Historical Performance and New Music: Aesthetics and Practices (Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture) 1032291427, 9781032291420

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Endorsement Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Music Examples
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Introduction
Part I Aesthetics and Media
Chapter 1 Unfixed Media: On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music
Chapter 2 Open-Source Performance Practice: The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy
Chapter 3 Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival
Chapter 4 Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation: Reading Pre-Twentieth-Century Scores through the Lens of an Avant-Garde Notation
Part II Old Instruments for New Music
Chapter 5 Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices: Vibrato, Historically Informed Performance, and New Music
Chapter 6 A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute: Tradition as a Key to Innovation
Chapter 7 The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music
Chapter 8 A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance
Chapter 9 Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)
Part III Case Studies
Chapter 10 Feeding the Flexible Omnivore: Collaborative Systems in A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth
Chapter 11 The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian
Chapter 12 The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects
Bibliography, Audio, and Audio-Visual Sources
Index

Citation preview

Historical Performance and New Music

The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences. Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others. Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life. Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016). Estelí Gomez is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her “clear, bright voice” (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill. Rachael Lansang serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater.

Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture series

The early music revival and the new music scene have been inspiring each other and cross-pollinating for several decades. Historical Performance and New Music: Aesthetics and Practices presents a groundbreaking and comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between these two domains by bringing together firsthand testimonies from some of the most authoritative, experienced, and original voices in both scholarship and practice. This pioneering work delves into the intertwining threads that connect early and new music, shedding new light on performance practice, instrumentarium, and notation. It is a must-read for composers and performers immersed in both realms, encouraging a reevaluation of the historical context of the early music revival and a broader outlook on contemporary repertoire, to the extent of redefining the boundaries of historical performance. —Alon Schab, author of A Performer’s Guide to Transcribing, Editing and Arranging Early Music

Historical Performance and New Music Aesthetics and Practices

Edited by Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, and Rachael Lansang

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, Rachael Lansang; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, Rachael Lansang to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cypess, Rebecca, editor. | Gomez, Estelí, editor. | Lansang, Rachael, editor. Title: Historical performance and new music : aesthetics and practices / edited by Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, and Rachael Lansang. Description: [1.] | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Studies in contemporary music and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023027230 (print) | LCCN 2023027231 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032291420 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032291437 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003300229 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music–Performance–History–21st century. | Music– Performance–History–20th century. | Historically informed performance (Music) Classification: LCC ML457 .H48 2023 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) | DDC 781.46– dc23/eng/20230614 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023027230 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023027231 ISBN: 9781032291420 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032291437 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003300229 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003300229 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Don Irving, who gave me the gift of early music.

—R. C.

For collaborators who’ve shared wholeheartedly and for mentors (Lalli, Simon, Sarah W, and Mr. Sylvan) who’ve listened and made space: thank you. —E. G. To Cecilia and Honor, who give me confidence and purpose. —R. L.

Contents

List of Figures List of Music Examples List of Tables List of Contributors Introduction

xi xii xiii xiv 1

REBECCA CYPESS

PART I

Aesthetics and Media

11

1 Unfixed Media: On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music

13

KIMARY FICK AND JASON FICK

2 Open-Source Performance Practice: The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy

27

DRAKE ANDERSEN

3 Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival

42

LOREN LUDWIG

4 Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation: Reading Pre-Twentieth-Century Scores through the Lens of an Avant-Garde Notation DAVID HYUN-SU KIM, ELLY TOYODA, AND REBECCA CYPESS

61

x Contents PART II

Old Instruments for New Music

77

5 Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices: Vibrato, Historically Informed Performance, and New Music

79

RACHAEL LANSANG AND ERIC RICE

6 A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute: Tradition as a Key to Innovation

95

MATTEO GEMOLO

7 The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music

106

FRANCIS KNIGHTS

8 A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance 118 J. DREW STEPHEN

9 Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)

135

REBECCA CYPESS

PART III

Case Studies

147

10 Feeding the Flexible Omnivore: Collaborative Systems in A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth

149

ESTELÍ GOMEZ AND SARAH DARLING

11 The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian

166

KAILAN R. RUBINOFF

12 The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects

189

VICTORIA ASCHHEIM

Bibliography, Audio, and Audio-Visual Sources Index

209 228

Figures

3.1 In C by Terry Riley, In C 44 3.2 Diego Ortiz, Trattado de glosas (Rome: Dorico, 1553), 5 45 4.1 Georg Philipp Telemann, “Lilliputsche chaconne,” from Die getreue Music-Meister welcher so wol für Sänger als Instrumentalisten allerhand Gattungen musicalischer Stück (Hamburg: Telemann, 1728), 32 69 4.2 Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing one type of trill in Control Freak (2015) 72 4.3 Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing another type of trill in Control Freak (2015) 72 6.1 Hans-Martin Linde, Anspielungen, bars 3–7 96 7.1 Max Beerbohm, Drawing of Lord Berners, titled “Lord Berners, Making More Sweetness than Violence” 109 7.2 Mátyás Seiber, Pezzo per il Clavicordo, bars 1–5 112 7.3 Julia Usher, Clavicle, bars 1–11 113 8.1 Harmonic series with out-of-tune pitches shaded 119 11.1 Cover of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien, Monteverdi, 9-CD set, disc 9, Cathy Berberian Sings Monteverdi 167 11.2 Luciano Berio, Epiphanies, VI (text by James Joyce), bars 440–442 172 11.3 Cover of Cathy Berberian Sings Claudio Monteverdi. Telefunken 6.41930, 1975 177

Music Examples

4.1 Pablo de Sarasate, Zigeunerweisen, op. 20 (1878), bars 1–4. 70 5.1 Philomel, bars 119–127. Words by John Hollander. Music by Milton Babbitt. Copyright © 1964 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 88 8.1 Fourth horn solo from Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 (1824), III, bars 90–98. Stopped notes are indicated with + signs. 120 8.2 “Prologue,” from Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, op. 31, bars 1–14. Natural tunings are indicated by asterisks. © 1944 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. 122 8.3 Hermann Baumann, Elegia für Naturhorn, opening. Natural tunings are indicated with asterisks; stopped notes by + signs. © 1984 by Bote & Bock Musik- und Bühneverlag GMBH & Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. 124 8.4 “Praeludium,” from György Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto, bars 1–7. Horns sound as notated. Copyright © 1999 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors Company, sole US and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. 127 12.1 David Lang, “I lost a sock,” bars 10–16. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing. 199 12.2 David Lang, “When any man,” bars 1–4. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing. 204

Tables

8.1 Chronological List of Modern Works for Natural Horn 8.2 A Comparison of the Natural Tuning of the Harmonic Series to Other Standard Systems of Tuning 8.3 Selected Works for Valve Horn Using Natural Horn Tunings

129 131 132

Contributors

Drake Andersen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College. His research examines the forces that shape musicians’ choices in performance. His article “Hearing Epistemic Sound in Experimental (Music) Systems, 1958–73” recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music (2022). Victoria Aschheim is a visiting assistant professor of music at Carleton College. Previously, she was a lecturer in music at Dartmouth College and a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She studies American music and its relations to civic life. Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016). Sarah Darling enjoys a varied musical career as a performer and educator on viola and Baroque violin. She is a member of A Far Cry and Boston Baroque, serves on the faculty of the Longy School of Music, and co-directs the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra. Jason Fick is Coordinator of Music Technology and Production at Oregon State University. His research explores relationships between commercial and experimental media and has been published by Audio Engineering Society, Organised Sound, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Journal of General Music Education, and College Music Society. Kimary Fick, Instructor of Music History at Oregon State University, is a musicologist and historical flutist. Her research examines the intersection of music and aesthetics in the eighteenth century and has been published in Women and Music, Early Modern Women, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. Matteo Gemolo, a flutist and author, holds a doctorate in music performance from Cardiff University. He regularly performs with internationally renowned early music ensembles. As a soloist, he has recorded several CDs for Arcana (Outhere Music). He is the music curator of Coudenberg Sound Box Fest (Brussels). 

Contributors  xv Estelí Gomez is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her “clear, bright voice” (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill. David Hyun-su Kim is regarded as “a performer of artistry, integrity, and interest who rivals Golden Age pianists” (Early Music America) and “among the finest pianists of his generation” (WholeNote). He holds degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Cornell Universities and recently released a much-acclaimed disc of Robert Schumann performed on a nineteenth-century piano. Francis Knights is a Fellow and Tutor of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with research interests in manuscript studies, performance practice, and organology. He has recently performed complete cycles of Bach’s clavier works and the virginalists and is currently completing books on music analysis and modern clavichord music. Rachael Lansang serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater. Loren Ludwig is a music historian and performer based in Baltimore, MD, and a co-founder of LeStrange Viols, ACRONYM, and Science Ficta. His work, which has appeared in BACH and EMAg, among others, explores forgotten moments in the history of instruments, practices, and ideas. Eric Rice is Head of the Music Department at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches music history and directs the Collegium. His recent recording with Ensemble Origo, Le nozze in Baviera, explores the performance practices and contexts of moresche, sixteenth-century representations of Black Africans. Kailan R. Rubinoff is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Recent publications appear in the Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Music and Protest in 1968 (2013). She is currently writing a book on historical performance in the Netherlands. J. Drew Stephen is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His articles on natural horn practices have appeared in The Historic Brass Society Journal, the Journal of the Haydn Society of Great Britain, and The Horn Call. Elly Toyoda is Visiting Assistant Professor of Violin at Sunderman Conservatory of Music, Gettysburg College. She holds degrees from Oberlin, Yale, and Rutgers, where her doctoral thesis was titled “Musical Paradoxes in the Violin Works of Olivier Messiaen.” She regularly premieres works by Martin Bresnick and others.

Introduction Rebecca Cypess

Resonances between the worlds of historically informed performance (HIP) and new music are widely acknowledged, at least anecdotally. Most obviously, many performers move easily between these two seemingly disparate worlds, applying their musical ideals and habits of performance in both settings. But the overlapping aesthetics and practices do not stop at personnel; indeed, lists of performers are often only the clearest manifestation of common principles that underlie the HIP world and that of new music. Of course, neither world is monolithic, and it would be impossible and undesirable to reduce either to a single set of ideals and performance practices. Yet, as this volume demonstrates, consideration of these two musical worlds alongside one another leads to an understanding of a constellation of shared values and approaches. Why do some performers move so easily between historical performance and new music? In many cases, these two worlds call for similar skills and practices. One such practice is a flexible approach to the musical score—a flexibility required for the interpretation of both the skeletal, “thin” notation of early music and the indeterminate music of composers such as John Cage, Terry Riley, and their successors. To be sure, many avant-garde composers rejected such indeterminate aspects of sound (Cage himself was equivocal on this matter, and some of his music removes the autonomy of the performer entirely), but a significant strain of new music since the 1960s places considerable value on performerly flexibility. Notwithstanding the accusations of an excessive text-fidelity leveled at HIP practitioners in the 1980s by Richard Taruskin, among others (more on this below and in the chapter in this volume by Kimary Fick and Jason Fick),1 HIP today often requires performers to elaborate and ornament on thinly notated music to a high degree, which in turn leads many performers to leave a unique stamp on a given piece of music. Similarly, many composers today have continued to build on the precedent of Cage and his twentieth-century contemporaries by engaging performers in a partnership—whether at the stage of composition or after the composition has already been finished—thereby inviting a level of personalization on the part of the performer.2 Another musical value shared by some of the worlds of HIP and new music is that of variation in sound production. While many mainstream classical performers seek to cultivate consistency—and consistent beauty—in their tone production and vibrato, practitioners of HIP and new music often eschew such consistency. DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-1

2  Rebecca Cypess Period instruments are often inconsistent as a function of their construction. A possible negative effect of this circumstance is that they often go out of tune easily; an advantage, however, is the multiplicity of sounds that they produce. The timbre of a historical keyboard instrument, for example, may change radically from one register to another; the natural horn displays such inconsistency from one chromatic pitch to the next. (See J. Drew Stephen’s chapter in this volume for more on the natural horn and its revival among twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers.) While the technologies of modern pianos and horns were developed in part to iron out these inconsistencies, there is reason to think that composers who worked with pre-Industrial Age pianos and those who wrote for the natural horn through the nineteenth century appreciated this timbral variety and sought to leverage it in their compositions. Another instance is in vocal technique: descriptions of vocal vibrato from the Renaissance through the Romantic age indicate that it was not a consistent feature of sound, but one that was deployed in certain contexts and for certain effects; by definition, this means that the tone and timbre of voices were also highly changeable. (See the contribution to this volume by Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice.) In all these cases, instruments serve as objects to be explored and understood, with all their advantages and apparent imperfections. The same pursuit of variety in tone and timbre can be seen in the work of many avant-garde composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 When Cage and his contemporaries championed both silence and noise as components of music, they rejected consistency as requirements of musical performance.4 Whether they were aware of the historical precedent or not, these members of the twentiethcentury avant garde were picking up on an approach to sound that had a long history. When contemporary composers started writing music for period instruments, their use of those instruments declared an affiliation with this alternative, historical approach to sound. The noises and inconsistencies that period instruments invariably display—the scratchiness that comes from the use of gut strings, the timbral variety afforded by the wooden transverse flute—become sources of sound to be explored and exploited in new compositions. (See my chapter in this volume on the viol music of Molly Herron as well as the chapter by Matteo Gemolo on new compositions for historical flutes.) Through their presence in both the world of new music and that of historical performance, period instruments become objets trouvés, “found objects,” or semiotic signifiers that convey meaning even when separated from their original context.5 Indeed, many composers who write for period instruments are also practitioners of period instruments, meaning that they have developed familiarity with both the instruments and the performance practices that go along with them. Their music often explores what virtuosity might mean for their particular instrument, and they sometimes develop new and extended techniques to mine the depths of those instruments more fully. Performers who specialize in HIP, new music, or both are often used to performing without a central director or conductor.6 Although the HIP world has its superstar directors, just like the mainstream classical world, some of these conductors lead from the harpsichord, the first-violin chair, or another spot in the ensemble; this position places them within the group, rather than above it. Moreover,

Introduction  3 many HIP ensembles have learned to operate without a conductor or director at all, and they cultivate a purposefully collaborative approach to music making. This is true, too, of some ensembles that play in a mainstream style, such as Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but it is far more common in ensembles such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, which sometimes performs with guest conductors but often performs under the leadership of one of their concertmasters. (On the flexibility and collaborative leadership models of the string ensemble A Far Cry and the vocal band Roomful of Teeth, see the chapter by Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling in this volume.) This collaborative, non-hierarchical approach to music making is both informed by and reflected in the championing of music by little-known composers, including music by women and others underrepresented in the world of mainstream classical music.7 Musical democratization is evident, too, in some aspects of contemporary electronic music, as discussed in the chapter in this volume by Drake Andersen as well as the one by Kimary Fick and Jason Fick. Lines between mainstream performance and HIP have, to some extent, blurred in recent years. For example, the New York Philharmonic now regularly brings in guest conductors who specialize in HIP to direct its annual performance of Messiah. Bruce Haynes observed this tendency to blend mainstream and HIP approaches in his 2007 volume The End of Early Music. Indeed, this blending represented one aspect of “the end” of early music; in Haynes’s view, HIP was no longer the underdog but a widely accepted approach that had achieved both artistic and commercial success. Yet Haynes was also reacting to accusations put forth by Richard Taruskin in his essays of the 1980s and ’90s, in which Taruskin observed with satisfaction that the HIP world was gradually losing its counterculture approach and starting to perform music with greater consistency.8 While Taruskin may have intended this observation as a compliment, Haynes rejected the notion that the HIP world was becoming standardized—or that it should strive to do so. Instead, he insisted instead on a “perpetual revolution”—a constant reinventing of performing style in which “authenticity” was not an end, but a means to open new frontiers and possibilities in musical performance. In keeping with Haynes’s ideas, increasingly, many performers of early music have come to reject the text-fidelity that (according to Taruskin) characterized the HIP culture of the 1980s, instead understanding the score as a starting point—a vestige of a largely oral tradition—that opens itself to many different interpretations. More and more performers today are using historical sources to teach themselves how to improvise in a historical style—flexibly, fluidly, and richly. One example of this changing approach can be seen in divergent methods by which players of chordal instruments realize figured bass. Ton Koopman is representative of a conservative stance in this respect: addressing the music of J. S. Bach, Koopman acknowledges the many sources that suggest that Bach’s own approach to harmonic realization involved substantial elaboration, including melodic as well as harmonic elaborations on the framework of a given piece. Yet Koopman discourages modern performers from attempting such an elaborate approach, doubting that they are up to the task. The fear, it seems, is that modern players will somehow do damage to Bach’s music, tarnishing his

4  Rebecca Cypess otherwise pristine compositions.9 Other scholar-performers—I am among them— have disagreed with such a conservative stance, encouraging the “free play” with scores of early music.10 The highly flexible approach to the realization of figured bass by ensembles such as ACRONYM—a group that has experienced widespread success in recent years—suggests that the more flexible approach is becoming increasingly accepted and valued.11 Another reason why Haynes considered the moniker “early music” spurious was that it foreclosed the possibility that principles of HIP could serve to revolutionize the playing of music from the nineteenth century and beyond. Today, some of the most exciting work being done in the field of HIP is happening in nineteenthand twentieth-century European concert music, as well as in approaches that destabilize the relationship between concert music and popular music, and in those that decenter the European tradition entirely. While the phrase “early music” is still often used to denote music written before 1800, HIP methodologies are upending the way that music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is being performed and heard. Thus, scholars and scholar-performers such as Clive Brown, Kate Bennett Wadsworth, Yi-heng Yang, Neal Peres da Costa, and David Hyun-su Kim have, in the past two decades, presented new research on Brahms and other Romantics that seeks to unsettle the purportedly “geometric” (to use Taruskin’s term) performance practice that characterized some of the HIP movement in the 1980s by delving deep into the implications of nineteenth-century notation and by using historical recordings as important sources of information.12 (In fact, the examples of “geometric” performance practice that Taruskin identified were carefully selected and did not represent the full story of HIP in this period.) An expansive project by Nicholas Cook on the Piano Variations by Anton Webern has demonstrated how historical recordings reveal fault lines in performance styles, with some recordings reflecting Webern’s own flexible, Romanticist tendencies, and others adopting a more detached, “pointillistic” approach.13 While this latter approach ran counter to Webern’s own ideas of his Piano Variations, it reflects some of the anxieties about expression and emotional excess at the start of the modern HIP movement that spread across Europe and the United States. Recent work by Roger Freitas on Adelina Patti also uses historical recordings to elucidate the cultural meanings of performance practices, including their constructions of gender; for example, Freitas shows that Patti’s extensive use of portamento was a crucial factor in her projection of a “natural,” feminine aesthetic, but portamento is now seen as highly artificial, even saccharine, and is eschewed by almost all performers, whether from the HIP or mainstream worlds.14 To revive the lost performance practices of the largely enslaved African diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Early Music Access Project and others have called for the treatment of “slave songs as early music,” by which they mean deploying the research, experimentation, and creative methodologies now in force in the HIP world.15 As Haynes’s study shows, Taruskin has loomed large over the aesthetics of HIP almost since its modern inception. His insistence that HIP was not a historical movement but an inherently modern one may be correct insofar as all performance is modern: it takes place in the present, is made by living performers, and is heard

Introduction  5 by living audiences. But, as John Butt shows, Taruskin’s claim that HIP is not just a modern movement but a modernist movement is deeply problematic, because it glosses over the nuances of modernism and its relationship to history. In fact, Butt locates the motivations of HIP in a dialectic between modernism and postmodernism. He cites Charles Jencks, an architectural historian who identifies postmodernism as a “double-coding,” “which in its simplest sense refers to the combining of some historical allusion with something from the present.”16 Butt suggests that this double-coding is clearest when HIP ensembles perform new music; another instance might be when modern composers write music for period instruments in a modern style. Moreover, Butt argues that the use of recording technology that brings the sounds of period instruments to mass media constitutes another form of double-coding: for Butt, this is “an attempt to add something historical to the all-pervading presence of technology, a way of giving depth and difference to a lifestyle that threatens to become all too standardised.”17 The notion of double-coding is one that can be fruitfully applied to the consideration of the resonances between HIP and new music. HIP ensembles that perform new music and composers who write for period instruments are just two instances in which this double-coding can be observed. The dialogue between past and present that is a hallmark of postmodernism can also be seen in the tendency toward collaboration and democratization, the championing of understudied repertoire and composers, and the constant reinterpretation and personalization of musical works, ideas, and topoi. Indeed, even at the beginning of the HIP movement, when Taruskin claimed that HIP interpretations were (like other manifestations of modernism) alienated and depersonalized, performers who crossed the boundaries of HIP and new music were leaving an intensely personal mark on both worlds. (The chapters in this volume by Loren Ludwig and Kailan R. Rubinoff, among others, demonstrate this point deftly.) Since the 1960s, HIP and new music have both been experimental, avant-garde, and counterculture; yet both worlds were shaped intensely by the personal interests, passions, and talents of the people involved in them.18 To summarize, the aesthetics of HIP and new music often converge in their media of notation; their approaches to improvisation, notation, and text-(in)fidelity; their cultivation of collaboration between performers and composers; their approaches to ornamentation and elaboration; their idiomatic use of instruments and voices, no matter how inconsistent the sounds they produce; the cultivation of new or extended techniques; the democratization of ensembles and the absence or downplaying of the conductor; and the use of period instruments for new compositions. These points of overlap existed from the beginnings of the modern HIP movement, which emerged at the same time—and often in the same circles—as avant-garde concert music. The two worlds share much in common that goes beyond the level of theory and generalization. Their shared histories, aesthetics, and practices demand closer, more detailed consideration. ***

6  Rebecca Cypess This volume seeks to provide such a closer consideration. It features essays by scholars and scholar-performers involved in the worlds of HIP and new music. While acknowledging the debates about the broad, theoretical relationship between HIP and movements such as modernism and postmodernism, we seek to explore the specific parameters of the relationship between the aesthetics and practices of HIP and new music. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive; rather, the chapters consider a series of issues and cases that situate aspects of HIP and new music in relation to one another. The authors discuss shared aesthetic values such as democratized music making and democratizing technologies; “minimalist” approaches to performance and composition; approaches to instruments and voices including the decentering of operatic/bel canto singing and the aesthetics and techniques of composing new music for historical instruments; and cases of collaboration between participants in both worlds. We seek to open conversations about the aesthetics, performance practices, and broader cultures of HIP and new music today. The volume is divided into three parts, titled “Aesthetics and Media,” “Old Instruments for New Music,” and “Case Studies.” “Aesthetics and Media” opens with two chapters that explore the relationship between HIP and computer-based music. In Chapter 1, “Unfixed Media: On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music,” Kimary Fick and Jason Fick explore contemporary collaborations between HIP practitioners and composers of interactive computer music, arguing that, through such collaborations, the composer, performer, and computer have the potential to exchange roles to develop new performance practices. Chapter 2, Drake Andersen’s “Open-Source Performance Practice: The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy,” compares the effects of the laptop in the twenty-first century and the printing press in the sixteenth. He argues that the development of open-source music software—often a collective venture—contributes to the shaping of performance practices in the world of contemporary electronic art music. In Chapter 3, “Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival,” Loren Ludwig argues for a broad definition of minimalism that encompasses both aspects of the HIP movement and techniques of minimalist compositions as adopted by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and other avant-garde composers in the years following World War II. He notes that such composers drew extensively on the techniques of early music such as cantus firmus, canon, and diminution, reflecting “an equality of musical parts and performers” that was mirrored in the values of early music revivalists. Ludwig identifies the people and record labels who supported both musical movements, apparently motivated to disseminate the values that these worlds espoused. In Chapter 4, “Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation,” I collaborate with David Hyun-su Kim and Elly Toyoda to explore the medium of graphic notation as a new lens through which to understand musical sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. While it might seem incongruous to use graphic notation—a decidedly modern term and concept—in relation to earlier music, we argue that this perspective illustrates how musical notation has long served as a visual metaphor for sounding performance.

Introduction  7 Part II of the book, “Old Instruments for New Music,” examines new compositions for period instruments, excavating the aesthetic values and motivations that undergird them. We offer one chapter on each of five instrument types—voices, woodwinds, keyboards, brass, and strings—not in an effort to be comprehensive, but as a means of opening pathways for further consideration in all these areas. In Chapter 5, “Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices,” Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice revisit the fraught issue of vocal vibrato, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes vibrato than has been adopted by many writers in the past. They explore cases from the past and present in which vibrato is deployed as a means of creating timbral and expressive variety, including in the work of present-day artists such as Pamela Z and Caroline Shaw. In Chapter 6, “A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute,” Matteo Gemolo explores new compositions for the traverso, positing “tradition as the key to innovation” in these works. In Chapter 7, “The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music,” Francis Knights explains how a modern clavichord repertoire emerged, surveying composers and institutions that have supported the growth of this now-extensive body of music. In Chapter 8, “A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance,” J. Drew Stephen shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-­century composers have approached the natural horn, revisiting an instrument that had been all but abandoned due to its supposed imperfections. As Stephen notes, these composers have learned to exploit the instrument’s unique qualities for expressive purposes. And, in Chapter 9, “Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021),” I show how composer Molly Herron’s intimate knowledge of the viola da gamba led her to create music that links her with other viol players both diachronically and synchronically. Part III, “Case Studies,” consists of three chapters that delve into personalities and collaborations that exemplify the convergence of HIP and new music. In Chapter 10, Estelí Gomez, a member of the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, and Sarah Darling, a member of the conductorless string ensemble A Far Cry, draw on their own experience as well as extensive interviews with their collaborators to show how their democratic approach to music making facilitates their “omnivorous” interests in repertoire, including their championing of both HIP and new music. Chapter 11, Kailan R. Rubinoff’s “The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian,” presents a new understanding of the performance practices and musical values of soprano Cathy Berberian. Widely known as a pioneer of avant-garde music in the 1960s and ’70s, Berberian was also instrumental in shaping the HIP movement, and she brought her distinctive, flexible approach to singing to bear on early music. Finally, in Chapter 12, “The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects,” Victoria Aschheim explores the collaboration between Bang on a Can and Concerto Köln to create an oratorio, Lost Objects, that encapsulated the confrontation between old and new, between objects lost and objects found. Objects lost and found—this, indeed, may be understood as the theme of this volume as a whole. By exploring the aesthetics and practices of historical performance and new music, the authors in this volume seek to uncover aspects of musical culture that have remained implicit, hidden, and unspoken until now. Moving

8  Rebecca Cypess beyond general, theoretical categories, we explore specific issues and case studies that highlight shared musical values and that illuminate significant aspects of modern musical culture. Notes 1 Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 129 and passim. 2 Of the many studies of performerly flexibility and agency in avant-garde music of the 1960s and ’70s, see, for example, Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (2014): 769–824. On the notion of indeterminacy as a decentered phenomenon located in the acts of composition, performance, and archival discovery, see James Mooney, Owen Green, and Sean Williams, “Instrumental, Hermeneutic, and Ontological Indeterminacy in Hugh Davies’s Live Electronic Music,” Contemporary Music Review 41, nos. 2–3 (2022): 193–215. 3 As Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding have observed, a preoccupation with timbre often reflects a value system outside that generally espoused by the field of musicology, especially as applied to Western classical music. See Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding, “Timbre: Alternative Histories and Possible Futures for the Study of Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4. 4 See the essays in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961). 5 John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160. 6 One recent study of music direction before the conductor is Peter Holman, Before the Baton: Musical Direction and Conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2020). On conducting vs. “leading” in the performance of new music, see, for example, Maria Puusaari, “‘Leading’ as a Mode of Interaction and Communication in Contemporary Music Performance-Practice,” Trio 10, no. 1 (2021): 40–64. On the role of the violinist-leader in contemporary performances of eighteenthand nineteenth-century music, see Fabio Biondi, “Editorial,” Eighteenth-Century Music 15, no. 1 (2018): 5–8. 7 Butt, Playing with History, 128. 8 Taruskin, Text and Act, 194. 9 Ton Koopman, “Notes on J. S. Bach and Basso continuo Realization,” in About Bach, ed. Gregory G. Butler, George B. Stauffer, and Mary Dalton Greer (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 125–134. 10 Rebecca Cypess, “How Thorough Was Bach’s Thoroughbass? A Reconsideration of the Trio Texture,” Early Music 47, no. 1 (2019): 83–97. 11 See, for example, ACRONYM, Oddities & Trifles: The Very Peculiar Instrumental Music of Giovanni Valentini (Olde Focus Records FCR904, 2015). 12 See, for example, Clive Brown, Neal Peres da Costa, and Kate Bennett Wadsworth, Performing Practices in Johannes Brahms’ Chamber Music (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016); Clive Brown, “In Quest of the Distinctive Language of Classical and Romantic Performance,” Early Music 42, no. 1 (2014): 113 (recording review); Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Neal Peres da Costa, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and David Hyun-su Kim, “The Brahmsian Hairpin,” Nineteenth-Century Music 36, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 46–57. 13 Nicholas Cook, “Inventing Tradition: Webern’s Piano Variations in Early Recordings,” Music Analysis 36, no. 2 (2017): 163–215.

Introduction  9 14 Roger Freitas, “The Art of Artlessness, or, Adelina Patti Teaches Us How to Be Natural,” in Word, Image, and Song, Volume 2: Essays on Musical Voices, ed. Rebecca Cypess, Beth L. Glixon, and Nathan Link (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 213–242; and Roger Freitas, “Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 287–369. 15 Early Music Access Project, “Expanding the Narrative: Slave Songs and Spirituals as Early Music,” https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=TF4w1So8​_M8 (accessed November 28, 2022). 16 Butt, Playing With History, 148. 17 Butt, Playing With History, 149. 18 See Kailan R. Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings: Early Music and ‘1968,’” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237–254.

Part I

Aesthetics and Media



1

Unfixed Media On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music Kimary Fick and Jason Fick

Richard Kramer writes, “Performance in its deepest sense is understood not as an imitation of the creative act or as recreation, but the creation itself.”1 Though addressing Enlightenment-era conceptions of performance, this statement could hold true for both historically informed performance (HIP) and contemporary interactive computer music composition. For the HIP practitioner, improvisation and freedom from the score offer an alluring antidote to the reverence of the work as a monument to the “composer’s intentions.” Likewise, computer music composers built improvisatory interactive environments to realize a freedom from tapebased electroacoustic music’s early developments.2 The HIP performer and the computer music composer are often united by the shared values of spontaneity and improvisation, rather than “recreation”; the score as idea, not a monument; music as ephemeral, not fixed; and the role of the performer as a collaborator, not an imitator. In new, collaborative works that join historical instruments with interactive computer environments, there emerges a special synthesis of this aesthetic. In this repertoire, the computer serves as a tool to reunite the composer and performer—who, in prior centuries, were often one and the same—in each creative act of performance. This chapter aims to explore the common aesthetic principles of HIP and interactive computer composition. As composer–performer collaborators working in the field of interactive music technology, we adopt the view that both HIP and electroacoustic music emerged from the same modernist aesthetic that was tied to a rigid faithfulness to the score, the “composer’s intentions,” and inflexible precision—an aesthetic that has since been overturned in writings that challenged “authenticity,” on the one hand, and in the explorations of improvisatory interactive performing environments, on the other.3 Indeed, this understanding suggests that HIP and electroacoustic music have always been aesthetically aligned. It is, therefore, not surprising that early music performers have applied their practices to both old and new music. HIP performers can enter the collaborative, improvisatory realm with contemporary music composers in a manner for which they are uniquely skilled. Examining recent works involving HIP performers and computer music composers, including our own experience working with historical instruments and interactive technology, demonstrates how interactive electronic tools can bring the composer, performer, and computer together to create unique performing practices in a new aesthetic, the repercussions of which could also have DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-3

14  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick an impact on historical performance practices. In the cultivation of contemporary compositional approaches, these works explore the sonic capabilities of historical and electronic instruments, develop improvisational approaches and redefine their limits, and engage alternative relationships among the composer, performer, computer, and musical content, thereby reaffirming music as an act of creation. Modernism, Authenticity, and the Aesthetics of a Movement HIP and electroacoustic music grew out of similar desires for perfection and obsession with exactness in the realization of the composer’s intentions. These two movements gained momentum during the mid-twentieth century as creators (performers and composers) sought new sounds. For the HIP community, those sounds were explored through replicas of early instruments. Likewise, the electroacoustic composer was inspired by new sounds created through electronic means. These parallel but distinct inclinations were apparently driven in part by the same modernist urge and were influenced by a post-Romantic emphasis on the composer.4 As Richard Taruskin argued, HIP performers imagined this discovery as “authentic” in that they sought to recreate the composer’s intentions above all. Through the nascent genre of tape music, electroacoustic composers explored new media through electronic sound processing and recording technologies, cementing their musical ideas in a fixed form, free from a performer’s interpretation. Though these two aesthetics at first seem widely divergent given the resulting sound, they were in the end aligned in their aim for “correctness” and “perfection” and centering the composer in the music.5 To be sure, the debates surrounding “authenticity” in HIP at the end of the twentieth century demonstrate the problematic nature of the origins of its inquiry. Taruskin argued that HIP was rooted in modernism, and he traced the movement’s origins to the nineteenth-century concept of Werktreue, reimagined under the formalist rigidity of the modernist and ahistorical notion of text fidelity.6 In other words, despite the experimental nature of exploring historical instruments using primary sources, the result of such performances was, Taruskin argued, a mere monument of composers and their scores to display for the imaginary, yet pervasive “museum” culture so aptly described by Lydia Goehr.7 In Taruskin’s view, HIP’s dogmatic beginning was less aligned with historical aesthetics than it was with modern ones, albeit with strikingly different resulting sounds. John Butt analyzed the arguments surrounding the historical performance debates at the end of the twentieth century in his foundational text Playing with History. Most significantly, Butt works through these critical texts to problematize the philosophical foundations that lay claim to HIP as expressing “truth to the score” and “truth to the composer.” For modern performers, he explains, scores remained autonomous; their notation casts the composer as “supreme controller of each work.”8 This view correlates to the early twentieth-century modernist approach to notation in works by serial composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Milton Babbitt, whose works sought complete control over score realization. This quest for complete control ultimately led to tape music,

Unfixed Media  15 which effectively eliminated a live performer.9 Such a view of HIP and modernism suggests they share an aesthetic that reduces the status of the score to a text. In this view, the performer has little value as “creator” and instead appears as merely a “re-creator.”10 Butt explains that the HIP movement could only have come to fruition within twentieth-century culture, particularly as it extends to the long Germanic tradition of the work concept.11 Taruskin and Butt idealize performerly freedom and exploration as the antidote to the score as monument. For Taruskin, this required a “creative departure from the text,” offering what he called “crooked” performances against “straight ones.”12 Straight performers, he explains, “do what they’re told (by a conductor, by a score, by ‘evidence’)”; by contrast, crooked performers offer “highly specific, unclassifiable, personal and intensely subjective imaginings … Every musical event ideally possesses a unique, never-to-be-repeated shape.”13 In other words, a crooked performance has the capacity to become “the creation itself,” as Kramer described of eighteenth-century aesthetics. Similarly, Butt suggests a category of performance that he calls “notation as alternative embodiment of the score,” where both the score and an alternative performance of it—even those that seem to go against the score—could be equally valid.14 Both of these approaches give more agency to the performer, allowing for the score to function as an environment with suggestions rather than a text to be realized. As questions about the role of improvisation and flexibility of performance continue to be examined in performance practice scholarship, modern HIP performers have answered the call for experimentation in both historical and contemporary works.15 Meanwhile, a parallel aesthetic shift can be observed through the history of electroacoustic music, from the origins of fixed media in the early twentieth century to the development of experimental and interactive approaches in the last few decades. Improvisation, Interaction, and “Invisible Partners”: Exploring the Role of Performance in Electroacoustic and Computer Music “It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers.”16 With these words, in a presentation on the “Future of Music” given to the Seattle Arts Society in 1937, John Cage advocated for the freedom of recorded sounds as viable compositional materials. Yet, the deeper message was to mark a shift in the relationship between composer and performer with the rise of tape-based electroacoustic music that would continue in the following decades. John Butt has gone as far as to suggest that tape music represented “a point at which performer and notation can be dispensed with.”17 Tape music, a new genre that emerged alongside advancements in audio technology, is realized in the studio; the composer is solely responsible for recording, editing, transforming, and organizing the sound into a fixed form that is performed (mostly) unaltered in concert. As Edgard Varèse asserted, “Anyone will be able to press a button to release the music exactly as the composer wrote it.”18 Varèse’s description reinforces the idea that the composer is at the center of the work, with the recording serving as

16  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick an unalterable monument, the ultimate culmination of the nineteenth-century work concept. As electronic music developed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there was an aesthetic shift that slowly loosened the control of the composer from the work itself. By the second half of the twentieth century, performer input had steadily increased, culminating with the arrival of fully interactive computer music, in which composer and performer share the creative control of the work. While the role of the acoustic performer was minimized in early tape music, that of the composer as performer was conversely elevated. In realizing their work, composers experimented with various technologies in an act referred to as “playing the studio as an instrument.”19 Performance in this sense is heavily reliant on experimentation by the composer to capture sounds with microphones, improvise with effect processors to achieve ideal timbre and behavioral transformation of recorded sounds, and explore various editing, mixing, and assembly methods with hardware and software. Writing on the importance of improvisation in studio-based electroacoustic works, Pierre Alexandre Trembley describes the compositional process as “an improvisatory exploration of the studio” through a “two-part process: generating a pool of material and then composing with it.”20 Richard Dudas offers the term “comprovisation” to describe the role of improvisation on multiple levels by the composer. The composer can take a variety of approaches: engaging in improvisation to create the “instrument”; using this new “instrument” for improvisation in live performance; and/or improvising with computer music tools to create pre-compositional material.21 In taking on these compositional tasks, the composer achieves an intimate connection with the materials of the work, now functioning as instrument designer, composer, and performer and thus potentially no longer requiring input from a live, acoustic performer. Though early genres of electroacoustic music eliminated the performer and (intentionally or not) rejected the variable expression of live performance, the continued development of technology slowly led to the reincorporation of and creative input from live performers. Various performer-composer-technology relationships enable the greater incorporation of the live performer into the creative process, ranging from the performer creating source material in the studio, playing alongside fixed media such as pre-recorded sounds, performing with live input processing, or, ultimately, improvising within interactive computer music environments. Incidental use of performers as source material is common in electroacoustic music, although their contributions in these compositions are often minimized or uncredited. Cathy Berberian, who worked with Luciano Berio on several projects throughout her career, is often recognized as a critical “co-creator” of works such as Visage (1961); however, Berio’s own author’s note minimized her role, merely stating that “the voice is Cathy Berberian’s.”22 Many electroacoustic works from the mid-twentieth century feature acoustic musicians as source material, most notably for the virtuosity and sensibilities they bring to a recording session, the results of which often become a defining characteristic of the work. Berio himself, in a separate interview, described Berberian’s wide vocal abilities as “almost a second ‘studio difonolog,’” referring to his working recording

Unfixed Media  17 studio.23 However, his reduction of her role in his author’s note reinforces the idea of the composer at the center of the work and the performer functioning merely as source material. Compositions for tape playback with one or more live acoustic instruments offer an opportunity for the performer to take an active role in the performance. Describing the relationship between the parts in his Pulitzer-prize-winning Synchronisms No. 6 (1970) for piano and electronic sound, Mario Davidovsky identifies the live musician and electronics part as a single, unified performer, explaining that “the electronic segment should perhaps not be viewed as an independent polyphonic line, but rather as if it were inlaid into the piano part.”24 By establishing a unified sound shared by the electronics and live performer, Davidovsky implies an intimate relationship between these players/parts and identifies the performer as an integral part of the creative realization of this work.25 As in Synchronisms No. 6, the genre of acoustic instrument with fixed tape offers an opportunity to engage the acoustic musician in live performance with electronics, yet the player is rarely offered freedom from the score. They must listen and respond actively to the behaviors of the fixed electronics, which were designed and sequenced in advance by the composer. Therefore, performers lack freedom from the composer’s intentions, and their interactions are limited to responding to the tape and adhering to their part in the score. Extending the capabilities of the acoustic instrument, real-time signal processing creates an environment that connects live musicians and the computer, or the “invisible partners” to use Elizabeth McNutt’s terminology, on a deeper level.26 In these early examples of interactive works, the source input from an acoustic musician is manipulated in real time based on predetermined settings or by an additional technician during the performance, ultimately giving greater control of shaping the sound to the performer. For example, Kaija Saariaho’s NoaNoa (1992) for flute and electronics divides the electronic sounds into two components: fixed and realtime processing. This piece requires a computer system to run a score follower that tracks the player’s input and alters input processing, a foot pedal to advance cues, and a mixing engineer (who can also be understood as a critical performer in this work) to balance the parts during the performance. Taina Riikonen suggests that the relationship between electronics and flute player in this work is “not necessarily merely a performer/extension relationship, but more a highly complex cyborg construction, i.e. hybridity of machine and organism.”27 While this piece allows human and machine performers to respond to each other in real time, flute players have identified limits to their freedom and interaction in performance that hinder their creativity and ability to act as equal players with the electronics. Riikonen, following her interview with several musicians who have performed NoaNoa, identified varying opinions on the perceived level of control: P[etri] A[lanko]: Yeah, what is miserable is that the performer can’t hear the final [aural] result … You are entirely dependent on the monitors, and what comes from the loudspeakers is audible more in the hall […] Your own role is clearly

18  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick reduced, and … you are just at the electronics’ mercy […] What the mixer does behind his or her table … affects [the music] at least as much as I do.28 When asked “do you consider that you are the only performer in NoaNoa?,” Mikael Helasvuo responded, “Yes, because I give the identity to the work, and it is not the same every time.”29 Camilla Hoitenga explained that “It is a solo performance which I control, I’m […] the one that’s […] there [on stage].”30 Alanko’s comments suggest a lack of control in these early interactive environments, despite the fact that the acoustic musician is often the primary generator and controller of the sound content. Interactivity exists, and the performer may inherently respond to the sound technology during the live performance in the same way two acoustic musicians may react to each other, yet the technology is mostly reliant on the acoustic musician and not generative. Helasvuo and Hoitenga, on the other hand, suggest that the performer imbues the work with a sense of identity, ultimately creating a new perspective on the piece with each performance within the parameters of Saariaho’s work. The development of smart interactive computer music environments enables flexibility and variance not possible with prior technologies. Robert Rowe points out that interactivity is two-directional, explaining that “interactive computer music systems are those whose behavior changes in response to a musical input.”31 Moreover, Guy Garnett writes that “interaction has two aspects: either the performer’s actions affect the computer’s output, or the computer’s actions affect the performer’s output,” the realization of which can range in complexity and be used in various ways.32 In more recent developments, interactive computer music systems involve custom hardware and software environments designed to listen, learn, and respond to input from live players. These systems often include sensing mechanisms to track performance information, mapping paradigms that impact computer-generated sound, and decision-making modules that can react to input parameters.33 On the other side of this process, humans can then respond to the decisions of the machine, ultimately creating a more intimate and intuitive performance environment. While the resultant sound from the computer part is often derived from the player, either through pre-recorded sound files or real-time processing, the performer and computer interact in ways that are unique in each performance. Such approaches could include recording and editing phrases for immediate or delayed playback, live effect processing, or extracting performance information to influence the behavior of electronically generated sound, among others. For example, in Andrew May’s Ada (after J. S. Bach) for electric violin and computer (2014), the composer built a “guided improvisation,” in which the solo violinist’s part is continually layered and processed live to create the sound of an ensemble. The accompanying layers of sound are built from modified versions of the violin input during live performance. To realize this through electronics, May writes that “the computer tracks, recalls, and matches material across time to create a responsive but unpredictable accompaniment, combining phase vocoding resynthesis of the live performance with assemblages of sampled violin and mandolin timbres.”34 As

Unfixed Media  19 is the case in many interactive works, the electronic part relies on the acoustic performers to play the environment, making the performer a co-creator of the work. Therefore, through this process, each performance becomes unique. The degree of variability in interactive computer music provides a platform for players to insert their own subjectivity into shaping the piece. Each performance of a single piece can be slightly different because the computer part is often designed to respond to the acoustic musician during the performance. If the player decides to take more time on a given phrase, the computer can pivot and react accordingly, similar to the natural correspondence between human musicians. Computer technology, however, can take interactivity to a degree beyond traditional acoustic performance, enabling the creation of new sound content as a result of human and computer responses. This process is demonstrated in Cort Lippe’s Duo for Vibraphone and Computer (2015), in which the computer performs a real-time analysis of the incoming vibraphone signal: to continuously influence and manipulate the computer sound … giving the performer an active role in shaping all of the computer output … The intent is to create a certain degree of intimacy and interactivity between the performer and the computer, in which the performer has the potential to influence the computer output based on aspects of the musical expressivity of his/her interpretation of the score.35 Similarly, Robert Rowe’s Cigar Smoke (2004) for clarinet and computer features a performer-computer improvisation as a central characteristic. During cadenza sections, “the soloist provokes and responds to sounds arising from the computer, which themselves consist of processed clarinet material and synthesized gestures generated during the performance.”36 While the introduction of electronics initially enabled composers to work free from live performers, interactivity offers an avenue to realign the composer and performer and create freedom of expression, particularly in works that involve performer improvisation and computer listening and response. Interactive computer music provides a space for the performer to function as a creator. As early music performers explore improvisational and experimental approaches with historical works, we suggest that their engagement with interactive computer music systems can generate an environment in which composers and performers can be united in innovative and collaborative ways. Composers relinquish control and allow performers to become creators, ultimately forming an aesthetic of performance as creation. Interactive computer systems can thus bring the player into a more creative role in the work, and the HIP performer can offer unique approaches to contemporary music with historical instruments. Towards a Symbiotic Freedom from the Monument The parallel histories of the HIP movement and electroacoustic composition found one important point of convergence towards the end of the twentieth century when

20  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick performers on historical instruments began collaborating with composers to create new works. These collaborations have proven fruitful in numerous ways, most significantly in the slow development of an aesthetic that conceives alternative relationships among the composer, performer, computer, and musical content in performance. While this developmental trajectory is not unique to collaborative works involving historical instruments, HIP performers’ training in improvisation and instrumental experimentation contributes to the development of unique exploratory approaches. Early examples of original works for historical instruments and electronics dating from around the end of the twentieth century began to use interactive technology, in which performers on historical instruments interact live with their electronic counterparts and, most importantly, become a greater part of the creative process. In works from the last 25 years, central approaches to composition for historical instruments and interactive electronics have emerged that take advantage of the unique performing styles of the musicians and timbral qualities of the historical instruments with the electronics. While this discussion is not meant to be exhaustive, we will survey some examples that demonstrate these methods. One common approach that effectively engages historical performers working in interactive environments is the incorporation of historical styles and genres. While this offers a way to juxtapose the old and the new, which creates “a form of modernist dialectic,” as Mike Vaughan suggests, it incorporates styles and playing techniques native to the performer’s experiences, both enabling a language through which the performer could speak in these environments and taking advantage of their particular skill set.37 Taking on the neo-Baroque style of a toccata, Simon Emmerson’s Points of Departure (1993) for harpsichord and electronics gives the illusion of improvisation akin to works by his seventeenth-century Italian counterparts. The keyboard part, though tightly composed as a series of eighth notes, is to be performed freely, in the style of preluding. The composer explains that figurations can be “pulled around” to give the feeling of improvisation, as if reacting spontaneously to the surrounding electronic landscape formed during the moments of rest, or “freezes,” indicated by fermatas.38 Though the harmonic language may differ from a seventeenth-century toccata, its stylistic expression would be familiar to the performer. This allows the harpsichordist to draw on their experiences with historical music, ultimately integrating their historical instrument into this modern context. In this example, the electronics function as an extension of the harpsichord through filter, flange, and delay audio processes.39 While the performer, computer, and engineer function as a single performer in the realization of this work, the unique performing practices of the harpsichordist are a critical feature. In a more recent experiment, a historical performer and computer musician explored importing historical tunes into a customized computer environment, allowing the performer to explore alternative arrangements of a simple melody. Paul Leenhouts (recorder) and Jonathan Snead (computer musician) collaborated on an experimental performance of the Scottish tune “Cumma Dhonhnuill Ban Mhich Cruimmen” (Donald Bain MacCruimmon’s Lament), in which the performer, engineer, and computer interact in multi-dimensional ways.40 The performer takes

Unfixed Media  21 a greater role in the realization of this work; the performer both creates and is influenced by the resulting sound of the electronics in real time. Furthermore, Snead, as an onstage computer music performer, processes the sound live with hardware controllers, thereby uniting the two human performers through the electronics. The software environment created by the computer musician is designed to allow the performer to explore the timbral environment of the code through the monophonic song. This process is a particularly effective way to enable a performer to incorporate their own experiences with familiar styles of music and allow them to function in multiple capacities as a collaborative composer-performer. In addition to drawing on familiar sources, styles, and genres, historical performers may also bring playing features and techniques unique to their instruments into new works. For example, the traverso’s single key and conical bore create timbral changes across the chromatic scale in contrast to the uniformity of the modern flute, and many pitches have alternate fingerings to offer even more timbral possibilities.41 Composers can use these features to explore tone color in combination with electronic instruments to exploit the timbral qualities of the instrument. Moreover, the open holes enable unique playing techniques that would have been used in the eighteenth century but went out of fashion as the instrument acquired more keys. Flattement, a finger vibrato achieved by partially covering and uncovering one of the finger holes, creates a pulsation by slightly bending the pitch up and down. Historical wind players also use varied articulations, including a double tonguing technique that Johann Joachim Quantz pronounced as did’ll, which maintains an ideal strong-weak alternation in a string of very fast notes as opposed to the even and uniform sound of the modern te-ke articulation.42 In order to avoid what Emmerson calls “historical tourism,” which ignores the cultural and historical background of the instrument, we built our own collaborative work, Silhouettes (2018) for traverso and electronics, from the idiomatic sounds and playing styles of the traverso from the Baroque period.43 We made the decision to incorporate features such as flattement and did’ll articulations, tone color variations, and common Baroque figuration patterns into a computer environment that makes processing decisions, creating opportunities to extend the potential of the instrument within a familiar framework of the historical performer rather than radically transform it. Alternatively, composers have intentionally sought to “other” historical instruments, challenging the performer to explore new techniques and sonic capabilities that may not have been used in prior centuries. Writing on the unusual cultural position of the harpsichord in our current society, Emmerson notes its “air of ‘otherness’—‘both near and far at once,’” and he suggests that its attributes can be exploited through the use of electronics.44 Indeed, works that take this approach tend to refer to non-Western, extramusical influences, demonstrating the “otherness” of the resultant sounds. Emmerson’s Time-Space (2001) for Baroque flute, harpsichord, and electronics sought the timbral qualities of the Japanese shakuhachi and koto; Emmerson and his collaborator, flutist Eleanor Dawson, developed a method for performing multiphonics and intentional “breathy” tones, the qualities of which break from the timbral worlds of both the traverso (in its historical usage) and the modern keyed flute.45

22  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick Uniting the familiar and the “other,” Juan Carlos Vasquez’s The Mirrors of Uqbar (2020) for viola da gamba and live electronics was inspired by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”46 To achieve his sonic “mirrors,” Vasquez’s work features moments with somewhat traditional string figuration on the one hand, and extended techniques such as playing on the fingerboard and circular bowing, on the other, bringing the otherness implied by the title into closer familiarity for both the player and the listener within an electronic sound environment. The player’s familiar techniques or styles often lead the composer in the creation of the compositional material; likewise, the composer is inspired by the sounds of the instrument to explore new approaches by the performer. In our own experiences as collaborators, the historical performer can find access into the creative process using either approach. Regardless of the historical performer’s entrance into the creative process, the composer often treats all of these sounds as unique, whether using historical approaches to the instrument or collaborating to create new ones. As technology has developed, the degree of interactivity has correspondingly increased, allowing the computer to take on a greater role within the interactive environment, thus offering a higher degree of variability in each performance. We argue that the future of new works for early instruments and electronics relies on developing effective partnerships that break the composer/performer barrier. Some HIP ensembles and performers are actively engaging in such collaborations. Therefore, rather than centering on the resultant works by individual composers, we would like to highlight examples of collaborative early music artists and their contributions to new music. For example, Science Ficta, which describes itself as “an ensemble of viola da gamba virtuosi … [that] tackles the thorniest polyphonic challenges, old and new,” served as an ensemble in residence at the University of Virginia McIntire Department of Music for the purpose of collaborating with composers working in the Virginia Center for Computer Music (VCCM).47 Liam Byrne, a viola da gamba player who actively performs with elite HIP ensembles, collaborates with composers to effectively break the limits of the composer/performer duality. Among his numerous collaborations, he describes Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Dissonance (2016) as “a 23-minute deconstruction and explosion of a Mozart string quartet using many layers of [Byrne’s own] improvisation[s],” identifying the important contributions he made to the work.48 In our creative partnership, we incorporated many of the elements discussed above to take advantage of the unique experiences by both the performer and composer in an effort to achieve a symbiotic relationship among the composer, performer, and electronics. For example, during our pre-compositional sessions for our work Silhouettes, we explored the potential of electronics in combination with the traverso to create an environment that balances predetermined ideas with improvisation. As a result, Silhouettes includes features tailored to the unique strengths and styles of the performer, such as indeterminant duration, improvisation of pre-composed phrases, and an electronic score built from real-time manipulations of the traverso. All three performers (traverso, computer, and composer/

Unfixed Media  23 engineer) share the control of the musical parameters to create a sense of intimacy modeled on historical chamber music. Each player influences and responds to each other, shaping the piece together in real time using the score as a guide or an environment. The performer, composer, and computer are united in this collaborative process, going beyond the limits of notation to make each performance a new creation that emerges from human and computer interactions. Conclusion: Towards a New Aesthetic The pairing of historical performers and composers offers opportunities that can be mutually beneficial for both new and old music. Performers can take an active role in the creation of a new work, placing them closer to a historical concept of performance than is possible in the realization of old music. Composers can find in the historical performer a new source for sounds, using instruments, styles, and improvisatory practices to which they may not have otherwise had access. Together, composers and performers can enter the collaborative environment to form a new aesthetic that centers the creative act of performance over a fixed realization of a score. One striking terminological feature that often appears in program notes for works for historical instrument and electronics is the reference to interactive performing environments as spaces: Simon Emmerson uses the term “landscape” (Points of Departure, 1993), Juan Carlos Vasquez creates “scenes” (Mirrors of Uqbar, 2020), and Ben Luca Robinson describes “states” (Artemisia for Viol Consort and Electronics, 2019), to name a few.49 The metaphor used to describe these performing spaces conjures notions of environments to be played as opposed to scores to be realized. A landscape, a scene, or a state invites the performer to immerse themselves in the work and become part of the dense fabric of the composition. Thus, adopting this terminology would more aptly describe the work of HIP performers who embrace “crooked performances” and “take charge of their personal contributions” through modern collaborations. “Works” as environments become spaces to explore, create, and invent; every performance is not an iteration of the past, but a creation anew. “Authenticity” thus becomes a domain of the performer in collaboration with the historical composer through the score and not a priori to the performance, as if it could exist somewhere in the score. Peter Kivy describes this as “‘The Other Authenticity,’ namely, the personal authenticity of the performer (in the sense of being original, unique, inspired).”50 Furthermore, the spirit of experimentation in collaboration with composers can challenge the historical performer to discover new sounds and modes of expression on their own instruments that can be incorporated into their work with historical music. Likewise, the composer can also benefit in forming a collaborative partnership with HIP musicians. Speaking on the value of collaboration between composer and performer(s), computer music performer Elizabeth McNutt writes: Performers are the most powerful advocates for composers and their music. As composers embrace the creative contributions of performers, new modes

24  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick of collaboration develop that substantially benefit the art of electronic music. Collaborations with performers open new realms of possibility in terms of form, notation, interaction and improvisation. Instrumentalists who enjoy extending their abilities should embrace these experiments, as should composers.51 In this space, HIP performers bring unique playing styles, features, and expressions, extending both their own abilities and those of the composers to benefit both historical approaches and modern ones. Many HIP performers are initially drawn to the performance practice movement’s central aim of experimentation with tradition; this desire in combination with training in improvisation makes historical performers ideal collaborators. Collaborations among historical performers and computer music composers thus combine unique perspectives and create opportunities to develop a new kind of aesthetic that breaks the composer/performer hierarchy. This new aesthetic is synergistic to a pre-1800 one, yet at the same time, the use of technology enables the collaboration to go further than has been possible in the past. As a result, in an interactive environment that unites the composer, performer, and computer, each performance becomes “the creation itself.” Acknowledgment The authors would like to thank the many composers and performers who contributed to the research for this chapter by sharing their music and ideas. These include Simon Emmerson, Andrew May, Paul Leenhouts, Jonathan Snead, Liam Byrne, Juan Carlos Vasquez, and Ben Luca Robertson. Notes 1 Richard Kramer, Unfinished Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49. 2 In this context, “tape music” refers to a subgenre of electroacoustic music. We use Barry Schrader’s broad definition of this term to refer to any music that is produced, changed, or reproduced by electronic means. The essence and aesthetics of the tape music genre continue in electroacoustic music today and are often produced in studios by digital means. Barry Schrader, Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982), 1. 3 John Butt addresses the HIP movement in the context of modernism in Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); on aesthetic shifts in interactive computer music, see Guy E. Garnett, “The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 25, no. 1 (2001): 21–33. 4 Garnett, “The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Music,” 28; and Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10–13. 5 Butt, Playing with History, 97–102. 6 Richard Taruskin, Text and Act, 12. 7 Butt, Playing with History, 13; Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Unfixed Media  25 8 Butt, Playing with History, 97. 9 Butt, Playing with History, 98–102. 10 Butt, summarizing Taruskin’s arguments in Text and Act, writes that “performance should be an act and not reduced to the status of a text.” Butt, Playing with History, 14. 11 Butt, Playing with History, 127 and 55. 12 Taruskin, “The Crooked Straight, and the Rough Places Plain,” in Text and Act, 317– 320. 13 Taruskin, “The Crooked Straight, and the Rough Places Plain,” 317. 14 Butt, Playing with History, 117–122. 15 Topics of improvisation, “composer’s intentions,” and performer experimentation were central in Early Music’s 40th Anniversary Issue (Early Music 41, no. 1 [2013]). See, for example, Nicholas Kenyon, “Introduction,” 5–6; Andrew Parrott, “Composers’ Intentions, Performers’ Responsibilities,” 37–43; Clive Brown, “Rediscovering the Language of Classical and Romantic Performance,” 72–74; Michael Talbot, “Early Music as a Rebalancing Act,” 79–80; Tim Carter, “It’s All in the Notes?,” 81–82; Christopher Hogwood, “Urtext, que me veux-tu?,” 123–127; and Stephen Rose, “Towards the Digital Future,” 129–130. 16 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 4. 17 Butt, Playing with History, 102. 18 Marc Treib, Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philip Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 176. 19 Adam Patrick Bell, Dawn of the DAW: The Studio as Musical Instrument (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 20 Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, “Mixing the Immiscible: Improvisation within Fixed Media Composition,” in Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference Meaning and Meaningfulness in Electroacoustic Music, Stockholm, June 2012, http:// www​.ems​-network​.org​/IMG​/pdf​_EMS12​_tremblay​.pdf (accessed November 20, 2022), 4. 21 Richard Dudas, “‘Comprovisation’: The Various Facets of Composed Improvisation within Interactive Performance Systems,” Leonardo Music Journal 20 (2010): 29–31. 22 Richard Causton, “Berio’s ‘Visage’ and the Theatre of Electroacoustic Music,” Tempo 194 (1995): 17; Luciano Berio, Visage: Author’s Note, Centro Studi Luciano Berio, http://www​.lucianoberio​.org​/visage​-authors​-note​?2019623839=1 (accessed September 29, 2021). 23 Luciano Berio, Luciano Berio: Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte, and Bálint András Varga, ed. and trans. David Osmond-Smith (New York: Marion Boyars, 1984), 94. In this case, Berio was referring to the Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan that he had founded with Bruno Maderna in 1955. 24 Mario Davidovsky, Synchronisms No. 6 (New York: Edward B. Marks Music Corporation, 1970), 1. 25 Davidovsky, Synchronisms No. 6, 1. 26 Elizabeth McNutt, “Performing Electroacoustic Music: A Wider View of Interactivity,” Organised Sound 8 (2003): 299–303. McNutt used the term “invisible partners” to explain the experience of playing with musical parts performed by computer technology. 27 Taina Riikonen, “Shaken or Stirred: Virtual Reverberation Spaces and Transformative Gender Identities in Kaija Saariaho’s NoaNoa (1992) for Flute and Electronics,” Organised Sound 8 (2003): 109–115. 28 Riikonen, “Shaken or Stirred,” 110 [emphasis and bracketed text/ellipses given by Riikonen]. 29 Riikonen, “Shaken or Stirred,” 110. 30 Riikonen, “Shaken or Stirred,” 110 [emphasis and bracketed ellipses given by Riikonen]. 31 Robert Rowe, Interactive Music Systems: Machine Listening and Composing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 1.

26  Kimary Fick and Jason Fick 32 Garnett, “The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Music,” 23. 33 Performance tracking can include information derived from pitch, duration, timbre, amplitude, patterns, etc.; an example of a mapping paradigm would include extracting pitch data derived from a player to influence effect processing. 34 Andrew May, “Ada” (2014), http://andrewmaymusic​.com​/Works​/Ada​.html (accessed September, 29, 2021). 35 Cort Lippe, “Duo for Vibraphone and Computer” (2015), 1, https://www​.cortlippe​.com​/ uploads​/1​/0​/7​/0​/107065311​/lippe​-vibes​-notes​.pdf (accessed September, 29, 2021). 36 Robert Rowe, “Cigar Smoke” (2004), 1, https://s18798​.pcdn​.co​/robert​_rowe​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/1076​/2015​/11​/Cigar​-Smoke​-Full​-Score​.pdf (accessed September, 29, 2021). 37 Mike Vaughan, “A Two-Part (Re)Invention: The Harpsichord in a Contemporary Musical Context,” Contemporary Music Review 19 (2000): 16. 38 Simon Emmerson, “Programme Note,” Points of Departure (1993) (unpublished score provided by the composer). 39 Simon Emmerson, “The Electroacoustic Harpsichord,” Contemporary Music Review 20 (2001): 54. 40 Paul Leenhouts and Jonathan Snead, “Cumma Dhonhnuill Ban Mhich Cruimmen” (2020) (unpublished score and recording provided by the composers/performers). 41 On the history and playing techniques of the one-keyed flute, see Rachel Brown, The Early Flute: A Practical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Janice Dockendorff Boland, Method for the One-Keyed Flute: Baroque and Classical (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 42 Quantz describes articulation on the traverso in chapter 6, “Of the Use of the Tongue in Blowing upon the Flute,” in Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Edward R. Reilly (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 71–86. 43 Simon Emmerson, “The Electroacoustic Harpsichord,” 56. 44 Simon Emmerson, “The Electroacoustic Harpsichord,” 35. 45 Simon Emmerson, Programme Note, Time-Space for Baroque flute, harpsichord, and electronics (2001), (unpublished score provided by the composer). 46 Juan Carlos Vasquez, The Mirrors of Uqbar (Paris: Babel Scores, 2020). 47 Members of Science Ficta include Doug Balliett, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Loren Ludwig, and Zoe Weiss. This description is from https://www​.scienceficta​.com/ (accessed September 15, 2021); “Virginia Center for Computer Music,” https://music​.virginia​.edu​ /vccm (accessed September 15, 2021). 48 Liam Byrne, https://www​.liambyrne​.net/ and https://bedroomcommunity​.net​/shop​/valgeir​-sigursson​-dissonance (accessed September 29, 2021). 49 Simon Emmerson, Points of Departure; Juan Carlos Vasquez, The Mirrors of Uqbar; Ben Luca Robertson, Artemisia (2021) composer’s manuscript (unpublished scores shared with the authors by the composer). 50 Peter Kivy’s analysis of authenticity is examined in Butt, Playing with History, 25. 51 McNutt, “Performing Electroacoustic Music,” 303.

2

Open-Source Performance Practice The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy Drake Andersen

Introduction If you had attended the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York City in the fall of 1981, you would have been among the first to learn of efforts to develop something called the Universal Synthesizer Interface, or USI.1 This proposal was the result of informal meetings between representatives from a handful of major American and Japanese synthesizer manufacturers whose customers had grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of a shared standard between different instruments. Within a year, representatives convened again to discuss the form such a standard might take but failed to reach consensus on the cost of implementation and certain technical details. Finally, in 1983—after months of labor and negotiation—Roland and Sequential Circuits released the first synthesizers with this new universal specification, now known as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI.2 Decades later, MIDI is still the basis for a wide array of musical practices, from scoring to picture to pitch-correction software to a nascent internet-based subgenre of music comprising impossibly rapid streams of dense electronic sounds known as Black MIDI. MIDI is so ubiquitous today that it is hard to imagine a world without it—a world in which musical sequences couldn’t be passed back and forth seamlessly between computers and synthesizers with precision timing, or the pitches of a keyboard couldn’t be represented with numbers that would be recognized by any other piece of hardware or software. It is harder still to understand just how the decisions made by a handful of individuals in the early 1980s could have shaped the performance practice of electronic music today so definitively—and so unpredictably. Yet technologies frequently linger in ways that are both obvious and hard to predict, carrying traces of the decision-making processes through which they came into being. By attending to these processes, we can better understand not only the technology itself, but also the music it was used to produce, and how it may impact musical culture going forward. The development and adoption of the MIDI specification outlines a more general mechanism by which musical performance practices circulate: intentionally or inadvertently, the choices and actions of individuals gradually exert a kind of regulative pressure on an increasingly widespread constituency. In this light, such decision-making processes can be compared with representative forms of government, DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-4

28  Drake Andersen in which there is a similar tension between individual and collective choice. In music, these decisions are sometimes the result of a cooperative or collaborative process, but historically, performance practice standards are more frequently the result of unplanned, informal consensus that emerges over time. These two approaches to decision making can be categorized as deliberative or aggregative processes—the former being intentional, collaborative, and problem-oriented, and the latter operating through individuals’ uncoordinated preferences and behavior. These two approaches are also frequently used to describe contrasting approaches to a democratic political system, prompting a consideration of what democracy in music might actually look and sound like. At the heart of this chapter is an examination of what might be called “musical democracy”: the collective stakes and participatory decision-making processes that continuously shape standards of musical performance practice. I propose that today’s laptop musicians have pioneered a deliberative approach to standards of performance practice that is facilitated by the free and open sharing of software and source code. This stands in stark contrast to previous models of performance practice—such as the decentralized, economically competitive musical culture in early modern Europe, fueled by the emergence of print culture—which have typically been aggregative. Throughout this chapter, I will examine how participatory practices are mediated by technologies such as the laptop and the printing press—two inventions separated by centuries—in order to emphasize the range of possible approaches to musical democracy. Additionally, in what follows I use the term “laptop” as a shorthand to refer to any technology that facilitates affordable, globally dispersed computing power for musicians— including personal computers, smartphones, and tablets. I find this meaning to be neatly encapsulated by the familiar image of the laptop on stage, behind which the DJ or “live electronics” performer is stationed during many performances of electronic music. Bringing the printing press into the discussion may appear somewhat incongruous at first, yet it is the broad similarities between the musical consequences of the printing press and the laptop that bring their finer distinctions to light. For example, both technologies have unquestionably exerted an enormous impact on all aspects of musical practice, despite being designed with other priorities in mind. Furthermore, just as musical culture in post-Gutenberg Europe was highly dispersed, laptop musicians today inhabit a patchwork of small, globally distributed communities with similarly independent—and often incompatible—value systems and software platforms.3 Consequently, both technologies endured a protracted and piecemeal adoption of universal standards. Yet while European print culture ultimately culminated in global musical consensus through the cultural phenomenon of what we now call Western art music, the future of laptop performance practice remains to be seen. By examining how musicians have made collective decisions in the past, I hope to shed light on how technology can shape the decisions behind the music we make going forward, and the extent to which they can be regarded as democratic.

Open-Source Performance Practice  29 Towards Musical Democracy Democracy has long been held up as an ideal to be strived for not only in political life, but also within cultural and artistic spheres—and in music, in particular.4 For example, it is common to hear that music can be “democratized” through the adoption of new technologies—a discourse that seems to have intensified as technological innovation has accelerated over the past half-century. Consider synthesizer designer Robert Moog’s stated desire to “democratize” musical culture with his instruments, or pioneering electronic musician Joel Chadabe’s use of the same word to characterize the unprecedented “empowerment of individual ­creativity” facilitated by the circulation of affordable music technology and rapid global communication over the internet.5 As Paul Théberge has pointed out, this rhetoric exemplifies a “tendency to equate simple technical improvement or the increased distribution of consumer goods in capitalist society with greater levels of freedom and democracy.”6 The result is a strategic conflation of neoliberal economics—the “market society concept of democracy,” as Théberge puts it—with the ideals of liberal democracy, including equality, freedom, and participation.7 Yet democracy is not a state; it is a process. At its best, democracy is an opportunity to challenge the status quo and change it for the better. Most of the time, however, it moves in fits and starts, taking unexpected turns and producing results many would have never envisaged. Musical democracy as I define it here works in much the same way, whether aggregative or deliberative.8 Aggregative democracy will be most familiar as a system based around voting, though voting is not strictly required for a system to be aggregative. A more general definition would be a system in which individuals’ preferences are solicited and amassed in order to shape policy or form the basis of governance. By contrast, deliberative democracy is characterized by robust debate in response to specific problems and issues. To put it succinctly, individuals form the basis of aggregative democracy, while ideas form the basis of deliberative democracy.9 Unsurprisingly, there are few examples of literal—that is to say, legally binding—democratic decision-making processes in the history of music. Yet the consensus reached through the workings of either model nevertheless remains in force through other exigencies, whether of remuneration, practicality, access, or technological compatibility. Indeed, the presence of such a consensus—a broadly accepted practice or solution—is precisely what points to the successful operation of musical democracy at all. For example, the process by which the two-staff standard for keyboard notation was adopted in Europe prior to 1700 outlines what I would characterize as an aggregative process. Two-staff notation was first popularized among the English virginalists and then overcame both the multi-staff partitura style in Italy and France and the letter-based organ tablature of northern Germany to become the dominant notational standard.10 There was no centralized deliberation: musicians acting independently, for different reasons, in different geographic locations and cultures, came to accord over time. Yet such was the force of the collective notational shift that by the middle of the eighteenth century, a work notated in partitura

30  Drake Andersen style, such as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of the Fugue, would be regarded as not only a holdover from an earlier era, but might even be assumed to be a didactic composition that was not intended for performance.11 Shifts in notation and performance practice such as this were part of a larger cultural trend towards standardization spurred by the growth of print culture. Around 1450, as the printing press was first introduced, musicians were closely identified with particular towns and regions, each with its own idiosyncrasies of notation, genre, instrumentation, and performance practice. Yet by the turn of the nineteenth century, something like an international style was burgeoning across Europe, along with uniform conventions of notation and the first efforts at standardizing tuning to a universal reference pitch. It was at the same time, as Lydia Goehr points out, that the work-concept was coming into full force, changing the fundamental conception of music as comprising works rather than activity.12 Yet no matter how focused this transformation might appear to have been in retrospect, it came about through an undirected, quintessentially aggregative process. The notion that a decentralized, aggregative process can converge on a single outcome should come as no surprise—after all, voting is the classic example of an aggregative system. Yet, at the same time, it is easy to assume that the newfound access to information afforded by the printing press would have spread new ideas, spurring increased variety, rather than homogeneity. In fact, a closer look at early print culture reveals how just how unpredictable the impact of a new technology can be. In her classic study, historian Elizabeth Eisenstein points out that although the printing press did facilitate a wider dissemination of texts, the preservation and accumulation of a greater number of texts, and the introduction of common standards, these changes did not necessarily expedite access to information on the individual level, as is generally assumed.13 On the contrary, Eisenstein argues that a subtler consequence of working with printed text is how it allows authors to “jointly [transmit] certain old messages with augmented frequency even while separately … spinning out new ideas” through sheer repetition of background information, regardless of its veracity.14 This “unwitting collaboration,” as she puts it—clearly evoking the aggregative model—induced a tacit argumentum ad infinitum, in which the materials reprinted most frequently were assumed to be the most authentic.15 Ironically, the effect was multiplied amongst the most prolific readers—presumably the writers themselves—resulting in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that increasingly crowded out viable alternatives. In other words, while the printing press may have been introduced into a constellation of atomized musical communities, over time it was actually instrumental in enforcing standardization and consensus. The Linux Audio Development Mailing List Recent decades have seen a return to a fragmented and dispersed musical culture among electronic musicians. This is partly due to the rapid—and at times, genuinely disorienting—pace of technological development but can just as readily be attributed to musicians’ ability to pursue more disparate creative paths than ever

Open-Source Performance Practice  31 before with the powerful mobile computing tools now at their disposal. At the same time, like other internet users, electronic musicians spend an increasing amount of their time online in small communities organized around common interests—a phenomenon known as cyberbalkanization (or the “splinternet”) that has been catalyzed by message boards, forums, and, more recently, social media.16 These hyperfocused communities have become a central feature of individuals’ experience of digital culture. However, owing to the interactive and peculiarly asymmetrical qualities of the digital landscape, they are also occasionally crucibles for developing musical practices and standards that eventually become influential across wide swaths of cyberspace. One such community emerged in the late 1990s, when a number of software developers interested in developing new computer programs for working with audio on the Linux operating system joined an internet mailing list to share their work and collaborate on new free and open-source software projects.17 The list was almost exclusively composed of technically gifted developers based in the United States and Europe who were male and communicated in English. While many were professional software developers, not all were, and even among the professionals, few worked in audio by trade. Around the year 2000, there was discussion on the list of creating a common standard for developing audio plug-ins on the Linux platform. Audio plug-ins are compact software programs that transform sound with effects like echo or pitch-shifting when loaded into other software. Just as MIDI allowed different hardware devices to communicate with one another, the use of a common standard for Linux audio would allow for the creation of plug-ins that could be loaded into multiple software programs—even those created by different developers. On February 28, 2000, a developer named Richard Furse posted a first attempt at a standard, written in the form of an application programming interface, or API. He addressed the mailing list, writing, “Got annoyed about the whole plugin thing and wrote a prototype API this morning.”18 What followed was the first draft of a well-known API called the Linux Audio Developer’s Simple Plugin API, or LADSPA, with the following overview embedded in the code: There is a large number of synthesis packages in use or development on the Linux platform at this time. This API attempts to give programmers the ability to write simple unit generators in C and link them dynamically (“plug”) into a range of these packages (“hosts”) … It should be possible for any host and any plugin to communicate completely through this interface.19 The draft was discussed among the mailing list users and just a few weeks later, LADSPA version 1.0 became official. Over the next two years, possible extensions to LADSPA were periodically proposed and discussed by the mailing list community, with the conversation centered around Furse and a handful of other developers. The most contentious debates focused on tradeoffs that suggested competing aims for the project: for example, the addition of a hypothetical feature that would have increased the overall usefulness of the software but might have made it less

32  Drake Andersen accessible to new users or less portable across systems (on his website, Furse notes with emphasis that the “S” in LADSPA is “meant seriously”).20 While such considerations might seem abstract, over time they can have an enormous impact on adoption and performance practice. The core developers seem to have recognized this and persistently found themselves fending off the potentially disruptive suggestions of well-meaning newcomers. For example, one developer acknowledged the need for a novel plug-in format that would reflect contemporary computer music performance practice through support for features such as MIDI and graphic user interfaces—allowing for smoother interactions between users, software, and hardware—yet still concluded that such functionality was definitively “outside the remit” of LADSPA and that the introduction of another standard would unnecessarily cause confusion among users.21 Furse’s development strategy—simply dumping the code into the mailing list and waiting for feedback—reflects an unmistakably deliberative approach: having identified a common problem, a community of interested stakeholders came together to negotiate the specific form its solution should take. It apparently worked, as Furse employed precisely the same method when preparing LADSPA version 1.1. Rather than aggregating the views of a broad sample of the community, only a handful of individuals were involved in any given discussion, each of which was driven not by abstract, preexisting preferences, but by specific contributions to Furse’s code. While this approach might appear somewhat haphazard to outsiders, it was typical of its time for open-source projects—and frequently quite productive.22 Modern collaborative software development platforms like SourceForge and GitHub are merely the latest means to the same end: assembling communities to solve problems deliberatively, exemplifying open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond’s famous aphorism that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”23 The comparison with post-Gutenberg Europe reveals the differences in focus between aggregative and deliberative approaches. While the printing press had the potential to standardize and widely disseminate information—and, indeed, eventually did—Eisenstein points out that in the early decades, the printing press frequently served to accelerate the spread of inaccurate information through the erroneous and uncritical reproduction of texts and even “ignorant emendations” made by the printers themselves.24 Frequently these corruptions were innocuous or unconscious byproducts of the pressure to produce books rapidly and inexpensively. However, Kate van Orden points out that many music printers discovered that they could turn a quick profit by rapidly publishing spurious works using the names of well-known composers.25 In other words, while an aggregative system centers the interests of the individual, deliberative processes focus on a solution to a shared problem which, to be widely accepted, must be validated by the community. In laptop culture, the process of validation is straightforward: the code must work. It is this simple fact that generally keeps erroneous code from sticking around for very long. In addition to being a place for developers to contribute code, the mailing list was also a venue for reporting on how that code worked—or didn’t work—in practice. Whereas early printers in Europe rarely had a level of musical expertise that would have allowed them to correct even the most flagrant

Open-Source Performance Practice  33 errors or inaccuracies, any contemporary software developer can immediately try out a new chunk of code on their home setup—even without understanding it.26 This process of community validation was simply not available to musicians and publishers in any meaningful way until the nineteenth century.27 Contemporary laptop culture also allows users and developers to continue to interact and resolve differences after the initial release—often in real time. While this is a critical aspect of the decision-making structure for open-source software, it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Indeed, Théberge identifies the lack of such a forum after the launch of MIDI as a critical stumbling block that may have unnecessarily stymied the first wave of adopters.28 Open Source, Closed Source One of the key distinctions within the world of software development in general is between non-proprietary and proprietary software, often characterized as a distinction between open and closed source.29 While the philosophical appeal of contributing original software to be freely modified and redistributed online through an open license is undeniable, the centralized project management and high levels of funding and time that private companies can leverage when developing their own proprietary software sometimes result in high-quality products that have no open-source equivalent. As open-source culture has matured over time, this tradeoff is less stark than it once was, but there remains a debate over the comparative merits of software development processes that are either carefully planned and centralized or improvisatory and decentralized. Raymond has characterized these two approaches as the “cathedral” and the “bazaar,” respectively, in his influential book on open-source software development.30 Yet in practice, the distinction is often hard to draw, especially since the differences between the cathedral and bazaar approaches don’t always map neatly onto the divide between closed and open source. Private companies may implement a collaborative workflow in producing proprietary software, while an open-source project may be the work of a single individual. A project may also drift between approaches over time. For example, the same online development community that was responsible for LADSPA also helped create Ardour, a digital audio workstation that remains widely used to this day. Yet even as Ardour continues to be developed as free and open-source software, elements of Ardour have been integrated into a number of proprietary software products over the years, including Waves Audio’s SoundGrid and Harrison Audio Consoles’s Mixbus. The development history of Pure Data, a visual programming language and software environment for music and multimedia, also known as Pd, exemplifies the opposite trajectory.31 The concept for the software dates back to the 1980s, when musician and developer Miller Puckette was working at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), the electronic music research institution founded by Pierre Boulez. Puckette developed software at IRCAM, but as an employee, all of his code belonged to the institution, and he was unable to direct the development of the software as he desired. Puckette eventually left and

34  Drake Andersen in 1996 built Pd from scratch as an open-source version of the software he had developed at IRCAM, which itself later became Max/MSP (now just Max). While Max is proprietary (and now owned by Ableton), Pd has always been open source and free both in terms of use and cost. While open-source projects have theoretically limitless potential, practical constraints can have a significant impact on performance practice. For example, open-source software cannot integrate proprietary code and retain an open license, precluding the use of some of the most popular algorithms for working with audio. Nevertheless, there are occasional crossover successes. For example, Pd initially lacked a robust tool for generating three-dimensional computer graphics in real time when it was first created. However, in 1996 a programmer named Mark Danks developed a software tool called Graphics Environment for Multimedia (GEM) with the same functionality for a proprietary version of Max that IRCAM licensed out independently of Puckette. Despite being created in a proprietary context, GEM relied on OpenGL, an open-source graphics framework that allowed it to be used across multiple operating systems and, importantly, integrated into opensource projects without violating the license. After introducing GEM for Max, Danks created a new version of GEM specifically for Pd, greatly expanding Pd’s functionality. In other words, a core aspect of Pd’s functionality was developed independently in a proprietary context and then introduced to Pd’s open-source ecosystem. Strangely enough, Pd’s audio package was later used as the basis for another commercial iteration of Max, completing a full circle of passage from proprietary to non-proprietary licensure and back again.32 Early on, many aspects of the development process for Pure Data were contingent upon individual labor and contributions and consequently could not be characterized as particularly deliberative. Yet over time, the development model began to shift for two reasons. First, as laptops—and personal, mobile computing more generally—began to proliferate, there was significant growth not only in the user base but also in what users were able to do on their own machines and, consequently, what they came to expect from a piece of software. Second, the emergence of online code management platforms like SourceForge and GitHub significantly streamlined remote collaborative software development.33 These platforms support and formalize the kind of deliberative decision-making processes practiced in the Linux audio development community. For example, individuals may propose a change by describing an issue or making a feature request. Alternately, they may copy the actual source code and modify it—a process known as “forking”—and then initiate a “pull request,” essentially proposing that their changes be integrated into the main branch of the project. Typically, a pull request must be approved by one of a small group of core developers who act as project administrators. This hierarchical structure echoes how individuals within earlier development communities, such as Richard Furse on the Linux Audio Development mailing list, spontaneously assumed leadership roles in order to move specific projects forward—a style of development known facetiously as the ”benevolent dictator” model.34 The number of contributors in an open-source project varies widely. As of August 19, 2021, 47 individuals had published or “committed” versions to the main branch

Open-Source Performance Practice  35 of Pd on GitHub, totaling 4,366 revisions, of which Puckette has contributed about 27%. A common metric used for evaluating how dependent a project is on individual contributors is a tongue-in-cheek unit of measure called the “truck factor” or TF. The TF is an estimate of the number of programmers a project could lose before it stops functioning. A low number suggests significant dependence on a handful of specific individuals, while a high number points towards a robust community that can survive significant turnover in personnel. A recent study found that about a third of the most popular open-source projects on GitHub had a TF of one, meaning that the loss of one contributor could incapacitate the project.35 Another third had a TF of two, meaning that two-thirds of all the projects studied would be significantly impacted by the loss of one or two contributors. Few open-source projects had a high TF—the highest in the study was the Linux kernel which, as the most well-known open-source software project of all time, was a significant outlier with a TF of 57. The truck factor is also a way of indirectly assessing how large and participatory a given software community is. Employing the same formula as in the study above, I calculated that Pd has a TF of three which, while still low in comparison with Linux, is actually above average overall.36 It is worth noting that deliberative democracy is typically regarded as the least participatory model of democracy when analyzed through what is known as the democratic reform trilemma. The trilemma reflects the conventional wisdom that only two of the three democratic ideals—participation, equality, and deliberation—can be captured within a single system.37 Deliberative democracy tends not to be participatory because in practice, productive deliberation is limited to a relatively small number of people.38 Yet, as I argue in the final section below, the collaborative digital tools of laptop music point towards a performance practice that is potentially both deliberative and participatory. Envisioning Participatory Deliberation Performance practices generally circulate through a confluence of aggregative and deliberative approaches. Details of performance practice may be worked out deliberatively in a small group—for example, within an ensemble or between a teacher and student—but the widespread adoption of a particular performance practice is almost always the result of a decentralized, aggregative process.39 Furthermore, despite the rhetoric of democratization discussed earlier in this chapter, while new technologies have frequently influenced performance practice, their impact has rarely reflected participatory or deliberative ideals. In early European print culture, individual merchant-printers could exert enormous influence over collective musical practice through the printing techniques they used or the composers they selected for publication.40 Indeed, the advantages of producing printed editions of one’s music were significant enough that decades later, as van Orden points out, composers like Palestrina and de Lassus “actively poured personal resources and energy into securing printed legacies that effectively benefit their status in music histories to this day.”41 Furthermore, just as the invisible limitations of software and digital specifications have shaped decades of electronic music in ways that were never intended (and can only be changed

36  Drake Andersen or worked around with extraordinary effort), the limitations of the printing press initially discouraged the use of certain intricate symbols, impacting how certain techniques and gestures were represented and transmitted and even spurring the invention of alternative notational systems.42 To imagine what a musical democracy that is both participatory and deliberative might look like, we must first define these ideals more precisely. In the market society concept of democratization, participation is equated with individual consumers’ access to new technologies and their subsequent adoption and use. While, in a sense, consumers do have the choice of whether to adopt a new technology or not—just as they might choose to purchase any product—their choice is influenced if, for instance, a particular piece of technology becomes an integral part of the performance practice of electronic music. In this context, the individual consumer’s decision-making power is severely limited. They may participate in a process that affects their own musical practice but not the decisions that actually shape the technology and therefore collective practice. Furthermore, their participation is not deliberative—their choices are constrained by what is made available to them by others—in economic terms, producers—not unlike a voting system. And if they choose not to purchase the technology—or choose a different technology—their participation is effectively annulled, as their choice is unlikely to have a broader impact on performance practice (unless they are an extremely influential performer). However, I would argue that the musical democracy that has emerged specifically in contemporary laptop music challenges this longstanding distinction between consumption and production. For example, while in most contexts performance practices are an extension of the activity of performance, I would contend that there is a stark difference between the labor that goes into the development of digital standards (i.e., computer programming) and the labor of performance for most laptop musicians, akin to the difference between performing on the violin and building one. When one considers all the other roles that laptop musicians take on voluntarily, including testing beta releases of software, creating online tutorial videos, and providing technical support to other users, it becomes clear that laptop music culture enrolls not a market segment of consumers but a community of collaborators. Today, the robustness of an online community can be measured by the amount of labor that community members are willing to volunteer. LADSPA was widely used for over a decade, facilitating an entire ecosystem of musical innovations on Linux that ran the gamut from digital audio workstations (DAWs) to modular synthesizers to a digital turntable scratching tool for DJs. While LADSPA’s limited scope eventually became a serious limitation—it is now regarded as obsolete, and its core developers have largely turned their attention elsewhere—the initial focus on simplicity seems to have spurred rapid and enthusiastic early engagement. In 2006, a more full-featured successor called LV2 emerged, the result of a splintering of the original Linux audio development community. Yet the original standard was still popular enough to prompt confusion for a new poster on the Linux audio development mailing list as late as October 2009:

Open-Source Performance Practice  37 Hi guys, I’m looking to delve into the world of plugins … and of the free API’s I find LADSPA, DSSI, and LV2. But the picture is a little confusing. It appears that LV2 is “current,” that DSSI is deprecated, and that LADSPA would be deprecated if it weren’t so widely adopted. However, LV2 is slow in being adopted. Is this developer resistance … or is it just too new?43 Within hours, a veteran user replied: as others pointed out, the [LV2] extensions (while being good from a design POV) have actually hindered adoption … to be very frank, i think the lv2 process showed that no matter how brilliant your design, if you fuck up the community engineering aspect, you’re doomed. LADSPA could be implemented in minutes by a braindead zombie … and see how people jumped at it—adoption rates were spectacular. compared to that, lv2 was a spectacular failure.44 Curiously, the first poster’s observation that “LADSPA would be deprecated if it weren’t so widely adopted” is exactly how MIDI is discussed by many musicians today. It is this ubiquity that has largely stymied more robust alternatives, such as Open Sound Control (OSC), from gaining traction in the marketplace of ideas— certainly more than any intrinsic technical advantage. As Théberge has argued, while “the MIDI specification may display a certain lack of technical excellence … it has nevertheless proven itself to be useful by thousands of musicians.”45 More germane to the notion of musical democracy, however, is the emphasis on “community engineering”—a common refrain across virtually all open-source projects. Indeed, Puckette’s explicit rationale for making Pd non-proprietary—and specifically open source—was that it would ensure more people would use it.46 As he has written, “The success or failure of Pd will ride as much on its finding a … community as on its design specifics.”47 If mailing lists and collaborative development platforms have facilitated the deliberative nature of the musical democracy I am describing, I argue that it is ultimately the openness of the open-source model that actually has the potential to increase participation through a somewhat counterintuitive incentive structure. As open-source software developer Karl Fogel writes, the indispensable ingredient that binds developers together on a free software project, and makes them willing to compromise when necessary, is the code’s forkability: the ability of anyone to take a copy of the source code and use it to start a competing project, known as a fork.48 Fogel continues: “Because a fork is usually bad for everyone, the more serious the threat of a fork becomes, the more willing people are to compromise to avoid it.” This might seem incongruous on its face, but it is actually borne out in practice. On the Linux audio development mailing list, I found frequent examples of community resistance to forking attempts, which ultimately strengthened the

38  Drake Andersen community by limiting the power of individuals and keeping a larger number of people involved in the same project. For example, during a particularly heated discussion in LADSPA’s heyday, one user asserted that: wherever LADSPA is heading, one thing is very certain for me: LADSPA and JACK are the very two projects that absolutely *MUST* *NOT* *FORK* or even develop “local dialects” at this point in time. I’m not afraid of forks in almost all contexts, but a forked “common” api is a dead api.49 While forks are a risk in any open-source software project, they are especially problematic in the context of common standards, such as APIs. APIs are different from other kinds of software in that they are the foundation upon which other programs are built, linking many different frameworks and functioning more or less invisibly like a utility or, as Linux Audio Development community member Paul Davis has put it, “plumbing.”50 As Fogel concludes, “This is why even projects that are not formally organized as democracies are, in practice, democracies when it comes to important decisions. Replicability implies forkability; forkability implies consensus.”51 This is doubly true for APIs like LADSPA, as separate standards jeopardize not only the standards themselves but also all of the programs built on top of them.52 In other words, digital standards are developed to be adopted by others and are consequently introduced in an explicitly prescriptive context that is far less common among new musical standards in the pre-laptop era. While there are certainly examples of musicians who sought to institute “universal” systems of notation and performance, they were rarely successful. On the contrary, shifts in performance practice are more consistently the result of decentralized, aggregative processes in which individuals’ quotidian preferences—even those initially intended for personal or local use—gradually take on regulative force. In this way, the laptop music community’s reliance on technologically compatible systems ultimately holds it together. Of course, this is not to say that technology solves all of democracy’s problems—this is as manifestly untrue in music as it is in government.53 Nevertheless, a deliberative process that is also broadly participatory escapes the theoretical confines of the democratic trilemma. In the case of laptop music, it points towards the possibility of a novel performance practice whose trajectory is not subject to the same market forces that shaped musical consensus in post-Gutenberg Europe. On the contrary, it points towards a vision of musical democracy driven by ideas—not individuals—even while promoting collaboration on the individual level. More importantly, it suggests the possibility of a decision-making system that is embedded in the structure of the community itself and which resists the disproportionate influence of particular individuals by incentivizing consensus. Or as one mailing list user put it, “Without a dictator, I guess we’re a democracy.”54 Notes 1 You might also have run into composer and technologist Joel Chadabe, who—among his manifold ventures with music technology—had been active with the AES since the

Open-Source Performance Practice  39 1970s. Joel passed away as this manuscript was being prepared. This chapter is dedicated to him. 2 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 85. 3 For example, see the recent survey of the diverse organizational structures and operating practices of 160 laptop ensembles from around the world conducted by Shelly Knotts and Nick Collins. See Knotts and Collins, “The Politics of Laptop Ensembles: A Survey of 160 Laptop Ensembles and Their Organisational Structures,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), edited by Baptiste Caramiaux, Koray Tahiroğlu, Rebecca Fiebrink, and Atau Tanaka (London: Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014), 191–194. 4 The volume Finding Democracy in Music surveys some of the most significant current discourses vis-à-vis music and democracy. For a primer, including a discussion of how democracy has been regarded as a musical ideal, see Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch, “Introduction: Looking for Democracy in Music and Elsewhere,” in Finding Democracy in Music, ed. Robert Adlington and Esteban Buch (New York: Routledge, 2021), 1–18. 5 Théberge, Any Sound, 72–73, and Joel Chadabe, “Electronic Music and Life,” Organised Sound 9, no. 1 (2004): 5. 6 Théberge, Any Sound, 72. 7 Théberge, Any Sound, 149. 8 It bears emphasizing that this phrase has been employed in numerous contexts with various meanings, perhaps most prominently in Nancy Love’s monograph Musical Democracy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006). Several of the most significant usages are summarized in Adlington and Buch, “Introduction.” 9 For a more detailed comparison, see Joshua Cohen, “Democracy and Liberty,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 185–231. 10 Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600, 5th ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1961), 14–15. 11 See Joseph Groocock, “Die Kunst der Fuge: J. S. Bach,” Hermathena 130/131 (1981): 77. 12 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 205–206. As Goehr points out, notational developments were integral to the emergence of the work-concept. See ibid., 224–225. 13 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 71–129. 14 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 127. 15 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 127. 16 Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Villages or Cyberbalkanization?” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Systems, Cleveland, OH (1996), 80–98. 17 Open-source software is non-proprietary software whose source code is made publicly available, usually with the intention that the code can be freely modified and redistributed by others. Linux is an open-source computer operating system first created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Today, it is the most popular non-proprietary alternative to Windows and MacOS. 18 The archives of the Linux Audio Development mailing list are available at https://lists​ .linuxaudio​.org​/archives​/linux​-audio​-dev/. Additional material was accessed on the LADSPA website (https://www​.ladspa​.org/), the Linux Audio website (https://linuxaudio​.org/), and a mirror of the original mailing list hosted at Stanford University that covers a slightly different time period (https://ccrma​.stanford​.edu​/mirrors​/lalists​/lad​/2002​ /01/ (accessed April 26, 2022).

40  Drake Andersen 19 https://www​.ladspa​.org​/original​_api​.txt (accessed April 26, 2022). 20 See https://www​.ladspa​.org. 21 https://ccrma​.stanford​.edu​/mirrors​/lalists​/lad​/2002​/02​/0080​.html (accessed April 26, 2022). 22 Today it is customary for open-source projects to use platforms like SourceForge or GitHub to store and manage source code. These platforms provide sophisticated tools for software development, including version control, at low or no cost. However, when Furse posted his code, SourceForge, the oldest major platform, had only been around for a matter of months. Linux, which got its start the same way, is frequently invoked as an instructive success among open-source projects. 23 In other words, complex and seemingly intractable software problems can be better generalized and solved as the number of collaborators increases. See Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, rev. ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001), 30. 24 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 108–109. 25 Kate van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 70–72. 26 See van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, 39–40. 27 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 218–234. 28 Théberge, Any Sound, 86–88. Later, Théberge discusses the importance of user groups and specialty periodicals in subsequently filling this role. See ibid., 93–153. 29 These terms and their respective scopes remain contested among specialists. See Richard Stallman, “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software,” The GNU Project, https://www​.gnu​.org​/philosophy​/open​-source​-misses​-the​-point​.html (accessed April 26, 2022). 30 See Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 31 A visual programming language uses a graphic interface to represent computer programs, rather than lines of text-based code. 32 Miller Puckette, “Pure Data: Recent Progress,” in Proceedings of the Third Intercollege Computer Music Festival, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan (1997), 4. It is worth mentioning that the dilution of individual authorship inherent in this process also has significant parallels with the circulation and attribution of manuscripts in early print culture. See van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, 30–68 and passim. 33 Pd has been on SourceForge since at least 2003, and GitHub since its inception in 2007. 34 For more, see Karl Fogel, “Benevolent Dictators,” Producing Open Source Software, digital version 2.3295 (December 19, 2022), https://producingoss​.com​/en​/benevolent​ -dictator​.html (accessed September 10, 2023). 35 See Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Passos, Andre Hora, and Marco Tulio Valente. “A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors,” in Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE 24th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 1–10. DOI:10.1109/ ICPC.2016.7503718 36 See Andrea Mayr, “Pd as Open Source Community,” in bang: Pure Data, ed. pd-graz (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2006), 33–41 for a detailed analysis of the Pd development community dating from the early 2000s. 37 See James Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32–47. 38 By contrast, a voting (i.e., aggregative) system allows for widespread participation but involves no deliberation. 39 One notable exception is the historically informed performance (HIP) movement in the late twentieth century, which reflected a deliberate effort to promulgate specific performance practice norms. 40 For example, see the discussion of Pierre Ballard’s influence on music publishing in seventeenth-century France in Leendert van der Miesen, “‘Unbelievably Hard Work’:

Open-Source Performance Practice  41 Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie Universelle at the Printers,” in Early Printed Music and Material Culture in Central and Western Europe, ed. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl and Grantley McDonald (New York: Routledge, 2021), 231–244. 41 van Orden, Music, Authorship, and the Book, 145. 42 See van der Miesen, “‘Unbelievably Hard Work,’” 237. 43 https://lists​. linuxaudio​. org​/ archives​/ linux​- audio​- dev​/ 2009​- October​/ 024346​. html (accessed April 26, 2022). 44 https://lists​. linuxaudio​. org​/ archives​/ linux​- audio​- dev​/ 2009​- October​/ 024350​. html (accessed April 26, 2022). 45 Théberge, Any Sound, 149. 46 Christian Scheib, “Two Rooms: A Short Conversation with Miller Puckette,” in bang: Pure Data, 168. 47 Puckette, “Pure Data: Another Integrated Computer Music Environment,” in Proceedings of the Second Intercollege Computer Music Concerts, Kunitachi College of Music, Tachikawa, Japan (1996), 41. 48 Karl Fogel, “Forkability,” Producing Open Source Software, https://producingoss​.com​/ en​/social​-infrastructure​.html​#forkability (Accessed September 10, 2023). 49 https://lists​.linuxaudio​.org​/archives​/linux​-audio​-dev​/2004​-April​/007425​.html (accessed April 26, 2022). 50 Paul Davis, interview with author, January 15, 2021. 51 Fogel, “Forkability,” Producing Open Source Software. 52 As Davis has explained, this reflects a kind of philosophical distinction. While many everyday software programs such as word processors and digital audio workstations continue to be expanded indefinitely and are consequently never “finished,” a standard must be reasonably stable in order to remain widely useful. 53 Regarding the former, see Christopher Haworth’s account of the difficulties encountered by the Res Rocket Surfer project in Haworth, “Network Music and Digital Utopianism: The Rise and Fall of the Res Rocket Surfer Project, 1994–2003,” in Finding Democracy in Music, 144–163. 54 https://lists​.linuxaudio​.org​/archives​/linux​-audio​-dev​/2004​-April​/007433​.html (accessed April 26, 2022).

3

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival Loren Ludwig

Coalescing by the late 1960s in works by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and others, so-called pulse pattern minimalism shares many features with the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque repertories at the center of the post-War early music revival. In fact, the intertwined histories of minimalist music and the early music revival track even more closely than their musical similarities—triadic diatonicism, repetition of musical phrases or motifs to generate structure, use of process techniques that follow strict rules—might suggest. The composers of the 1950s and 1960s who developed minimalism responded to (and against) many of the same modernist aesthetics that motivated the early music revival during the same decades of social upheaval. Early music practitioners aligned themselves with similar youthful, countercultural values and against similar ideologies and institutional practices as their experimental music peers.1 In many cases, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, the social and professional circles of early music practitioners and composers and performers of experimental music (the term “minimalism” wouldn’t be widely adopted until later decades) overlapped so thoroughly as to be nearly indistinguishable.2 Furthermore, the educational institutions, concert series and performance venues, and record labels that established early music as a boutique but undeniable category of European art music were often precisely those that also introduced the new, minimalist music. In this article, I chronicle some of these striking convergences between the people, practices, institutions, and sounds of early music and minimalist music since the 1960s, and I interrogate how these convergences might be seen as mutually constitutive of both communities. I document how early European repertoires influenced the sounds and practices of minimalist music during the 1960s and thereafter. Notably, though, this influence moved in both directions—the popular reception of early music beginning in the 1960s came to be shaped, I argue, by both minimalist music itself and the words its proponents used to describe it. Minimalist composers advocated for the use of unfamiliar instruments and playing techniques, the use of alternate tuning systems and timbral variety, and the exploration of repetition, diatonicism, and non-teleological musical experience. These musical values were supported by the creation of democratically led ensembles and a questioning of the perceived cultural and musical values of musical Romanticism. Early music revivalists shared these priorities, and I argue that proponents of early minimalist music provided the language that allowed the young historical performance DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-5

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  43 movement to understand its own radicalism in relation to the established practices and institutions of European art music. Minimalism(s), New and Old Musicologist and journalist Keith Potter cites the mid-1970s as key to the popular recognition of “minimalism” as a term and compositional idiom. After noting Michael Nyman’s coinage of the phrase “minimal music” in a 1968 article in the British weekly The Spectator, Potter cites the influential Deutsche Grammophon triple album release of works by Reich in 1974 and the premiere of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach in New York in 1976 as moments that “marked a new stage in the style’s public and institutional profile.” Potter continues, Some would date the style from La Monte Young’s extremely slow Trio for Strings of 1958; others from Terry Riley’s perhaps more crowd-pleasing In C of 1964; still others might argue for predecessors in the early-1950s experiments of the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, and even in the 1940s music of John Cage … [By the late 1960s,] a large group of composers, mostly but not exclusively American, had made drones, repetitive figures, strict process and gradual change a matter of considerable collective excitement.3 Once the term “minimalism” became identified with a particular range of sounds and cohort of composers, the inevitable search for influence and priority turned up “proto-minimalist” works (or excerpts of works) by Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and many others. Satie’s Vexations (c. 1893) for solo piano, which calls for 840 repetitions, was premiered only in 1963 in New York City in an event organized by John Cage and remembered as a formative moment in the early history of minimalism.4 Among the dozen or so composers who participated in the 18-hour event were Cage, Christian Wolff, David Del Tredici, David Tudor, and James Tenney, as well as future early music keyboardist and musicologist Joshua Rifkin, then 19.5 The New York Times review noted that the performers played from a photostat of Satie’s autograph manuscript, a gesture notable here for its similarity to contemporaneous acts of early music revivalism.6 Potter’s assertion that by the early 1980s minimalism had “shed its outsider status and [would go] on to re-energize the classical music world itself”7 is reminiscent of the “re-enchantment” of classical music by the early music revival described by Nick Wilson and others. In Wilson’s narrative, “early music” traces a similar trajectory as minimalist music from “outsider” status to “re-energizer” over the same several decades. Zygmunt Bauman’s characterization of postmodernism, quoted by Wilson, as “a re-enchantment of the world that modernity had tried hard to disenchant” is equally descriptive of both early music and experimental contemporary music as they developed during the 1960s and 1970s.8 As I will show, these two traditions emerged simultaneously, motivated by overlapping discourses of style and innovation in performance practice, and they involved many of the very same people and institutions.

Copyright © 1964 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Figure 3.1  Terry Riley, In C.

44  Loren Ludwig

Figure 3.2  Diego Ortiz, Trattado de glosas (Rome: Dorico, 1553), 5.

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  45

46  Loren Ludwig While minimalist composers drew on a range of influences that included contemporaneous experimentalism and musical traditions from Asia, Africa, and the African diaspora, minimalist music emerged as a critique of the combinatoric features of the received European tradition. For, with very few exceptions, the entirety of the Western notated corpus is constructed of permutations of only 12 discrete pitches and a handful of rhythmic values. Minimalist compositions of the 1950s and 1960s, with their focus on the repetition of small cells and the audibility of algorithmic processes, foregrounded the latent minimalism of the notated Western musical tradition itself. What’s surprising, from this perspective, is how infrequently explicitly minimalist music (i.e., music foregrounding “repetitive figures, strict process and gradual change”) has appeared since the adoption of notation. The Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque repertories familiar to postWar experimentalists rely on a host of techniques that can be described using the same language (repetitive patterns, consonant harmony, reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units, process techniques that follow strict rules, etc.) used to open this article. Modal logic, for example, initially emerged as a system for classifying the vast body of combinatoric liturgical chant during the Middle Ages and, later, as a strategy that organized the (only) eight pitch classes that comprise the three hexachords. Imitation as it emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a resolutely minimalist procedure in which strategic repetition of cells is used to generate larger musical structures (as is eighteenth-century fugue). In his Jameson-esque analysis of the minimalist tradition, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (2005), Robert Fink notes that the repetitive practice regime of conservatory musical training itself echoes the latent minimalism of the pedagogy of Western classical music as well as the obsessive cycles of consumerism Fink sees tied to the emergence of post-War minimalist music.9 Early music practitioners of the 1960s saw quasi-minimalist techniques in a wide range of early compositional styles and practices. In the sixteenth century, for example, treatises on ornamentation introduced tables of diminutions that would become a standard feature of the European music-pedagogical tradition and that were designed to be used in much the same “paint by number” way as the performance score of Riley’s iconic minimalist work In C (1964) four centuries later (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). More easily legible is the frequent use of cantus firmus technique and canon, two minimalist compositional techniques pioneered by Medieval and Renaissance composers that were warmly embraced by post-War minimalists.10 In the copious surviving writings about their development as artists, many twentieth-century minimalists (among them Young,11 Reich,12 and Arvo Pärt13) cite as an influence the twelfth-century composer Pérotin and, in particular, his organum quadruplum Viderunt omnes, which features cantus firmi that move on an almost geologic timescale. Modern minimalist composers, faced with the challenge of creating large-scale forms through repetition of small melodic cells and/ or pre-determined processes, quickly discovered that a slow-moving cantus firmus could be relied upon to offer just enough continuity to make a minimalist work hang together.14 Both historical and modern composers discovered, in their own

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  47 ways, that cantus firmus techniques allow for the fine control of a given work’s sense of telos—or relative absence thereof. For the early music practitioners of the 1960s, canon (or fuga, as it was largely known outside England), an “inscribed formula or instruction which the performer … implement[s] in order to realize one or more parts from the given notation,” was a minimalist technique par excellence.15 Canons in the Renaissance were often notated using a bare minimum of musical notation combined with a snippet of written text specifying the “rule” (kanōn in Greek). The game was for the performer to apply the inscribed rule to generate a complicated (and sometimes endless) polyphonic texture from the tiny fragment of notation provided. Thus canons exhibit both tendencies of “minimal music” in that they rely on repetition of tiny cells to create larger forms and in that the “process” determines “all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously,” as Reich describes in his famous essay “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968).16 Reich is one of several minimalist composers who has relied heavily on the use of canon to create his minimalist musical language.17 As early music ensemble leader Paul Hillier writes in the introduction to a collection of Reich’s essays, [canon], more than any other single device, dominates Reich’s musical processes. Whether as strict imitation or in derivative forms (such as voiceexchange or isorhythm), canonic devices permeate the texture of almost every one of Reich’s works. This feature links him to composers as far back as Perotin, Machaut, Dufay, Josquin, and, of course, Bach.18 Hillier’s comment requires little amplification, but it’s worth noting that Reich’s iconic work It’s Gonna Rain (1966), regarded as a touchstone of early minimalism and the first of Reich’s famous “phase” compositions, is actually a fuga performed by two tape players. New Ensembles for New (Old) Aesthetics Many minimalist works of the 1960s and 1970s relied on a suite of compositional techniques that had been pioneered many centuries earlier, including cantus firmus, canon, and isorhythm, but that were relatively unfamiliar to post-War performers. As minimalist composers would discover, these and other musical innovations would require new musical competencies on the part of musicians. Realizing minimalist works would also necessitate new musical ensembles that better promoted diverse instruments and polyrhythmic and polyphonic textures as well as the explicitly egalitarian ethos that motivated much of the music. As we will see below, many minimalist composers felt that they needed to form and train their own ensembles in order to have their works performed at all. Similar tendencies were emerging simultaneously among proponents of early music, who were discovering that exploring earlier repertoires required new skills, instruments, and ensembles. The same decades that saw minimalism coalesce as a style (roughly the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) also saw the formation of numerous early music

48  Loren Ludwig ensembles in New York and Boston as well as in Europe. The list of prominent early music ensembles formed during this period easily runs into the dozens. New York-based ensembles include Noah Greenberg’s Pro Musica Antiqua (1952), the Waverly Consort (1964), Denis Stevens’s Accademia Monteverdiana (1965), the Western Wind (1969), Calliope (early 1970s), and Pomerium (1972). A common trope in accounts of the first generation of minimalist composers is how difficult it was to find performers to play their often deceptively simple music. The most common solution was for composers to form their own ensembles comprised of like-minded musicians, often featuring the composers themselves as performers in these groups. Nearly every composer associated with minimalist music during its initial, formative decades relied on newly formed chamber ensembles, and many of these ensembles reflected the postmodernist, experimental, socially egalitarian milieus from which the style emerged in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Cologne, and Munich. La Monte Young founded his Theatre of Eternal Music collective in 1962. Terry Riley gathered players associated with the San Francisco Tape Music Center to perform his premiere of In C in 1964. Reich formed Steve Reich and Musicians in 1966. Glass assembled the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968. Michael Nyman (who had first used the term “minimalist music” in print in 1968) founded his Campiello Band (the precursor of the “Michael Nyman Band”) in 1976. Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang (who formed Bang on Can in 1987), and numerous other contemporary composers whose minimalist music comprises only part of their oeuvres, are similarly associated with recordings and performances by their own ensembles. For both early and minimalist music during these formative decades, what was required was nothing short of new performance practices, and this prompted the creation of new ensembles that embodied both the changing cultural values of the period and a willingness to cultivate musical approaches responsive to unfamiliar repertoires (either newly composed or newly introduced by researchers). In an interview with composer Walter Zimmermann in 1976, Glass reported, when I was doing [my] music in ’66 and ’67, the fact was that no one would play the music. And so, in order to find people to play the music, I found the most sympathetic musicians to work with … in the 1960s the nucleus of players that I had were practically the only people that really wanted to play the music.19 Richard Taruskin’s account of the ensemble Riley assembled for his 1964 premiere of In C captures the interdependence of sociality and aesthetics that ensembles sought to refine into new performance practices. “In C was a model of a very different kind of social behavior from that of a symphony orchestra under a dictatorial conductor,” Taruskin writes, representing instead a mode of cooperative behavior that was at the heart of the sixties counterculture. Also evident at a glance, and equally crucial to

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  49 its immediate appeal, was In C’s relative ease of performance. It does not require highly trained professional musicians and lends itself equally well to all kinds of non-standard ensembles.20 The Challenges of “Locking In” That minimalist music was initially (and incorrectly) perceived as “easy” by performers unfamiliar with the style is something of a trope that emerges in multiple composers’ accounts. Julia Wolfe, a prominent member of the younger, “postminimalist” generation, reported in a 2001 interview that a lot of times when players look at my scores for the first time, they’ll say, “Oh I don’t have that much to do in my part.” They might be playing all the time, but they don’t have to do any of the fancy leads. But all of a sudden they’ll see it’s so much harder than they thought because they’re locking in with somebody else to make something. That’s a lot of what my music is about, how people lock in together.21 The idea that what’s difficult is “locking in” with the other performers, as opposed to executing virtuosic individual parts, is exactly the lesson that early music ensembles of the 1950s–1970s were simultaneously discovering about early polyphony. One of the first innovations of post-War early music was the use of smaller forces performed by one musician per part, as opposed to the choral arrangements of Renaissance polyphony, for example, that had characterized pre-revival approaches. Along with one-on-a-part performance came a historical awareness of the relative equality of voices in early polyphony, coupled with a new sensitivity to the anachronism of a conductor in early repertoires. The awareness of this “consort principle”—that, as Wolfe put it, “music is about how people lock in together”—and, further, that early music could be performed in a way that was more authentic in its orchestration and appealing to the emergent social and cultural values of the 1960s, spread quickly and widely. The Winter Consort, a “third stream” ensemble formed in 1967 in New York that performed a mixture of early and classical music, jazz, and world music, for example, printed a long excerpt offering “some advice to consort players” by seventeenth-century viola da gamba consort enthusiast Thomas Mace on the reverse of its 1969 album Something in the Wind.22 In his 1989 essay “Chamber Music—An Expanded View,” Reich writes, the difficulties in playing [my] music, at least the pieces of the 1960s and ‘70s, are generally not in the individual parts but in fitting these parts into precise and sometimes unusual rhythmic positions in an overall contrapuntal web. This is often not so easy as a cursory glance at the part itself would suggest. My music presents a challenge to the kind of musician who enjoys being part of a finely tuned ensemble where all the details can be heard. The virtuosity lies in their ensemble relationship to each other.23

50  Loren Ludwig Reich’s specification that “all the details can be heard” is strikingly resonant with the “transparency” sought by contemporaneous early music revivalists. Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s description of playing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion during the late 1960s using historical strings and reduced forces similarly turns on Wolfe’s “locking in” of the individual parts and Reich’s preference for a “finely tuned ensemble where all the details can be heard.”24 “The small orchestration,” Harnoncourt writes, and the clear articulation of the early instruments with their varied tone colors allowed the complicated polyphonic writing to emerge in a way we had never heard before … Now we were able to see how each individual musician could again take pleasure in his own eloquent, well-articulated playing, because every line “spoke” and the interweaving sounds of the instruments as they played with and against each other suddenly became meaningful.25 Harnoncourt’s language captures the enhanced experience of individual musical agency on the part of his collaborators (“each individual musician could again take pleasure in his own eloquent, well-articulated playing”), as well as the sense that they were making “new” music. Later in the same passage, Harnoncourt writes, “[w]hat we accomplished was not the revival of an historical sound, not a museumlike restoration of sounds belonging to the past. It was a modern performance, an interpretation thoroughly grounded in the 20th century.”26 This combination of recognition of the changing social dynamics of ensemble performance, coupled with an awareness of the “newness” of the emergent culture of his ensemble, Concentus Musicus Wien, evokes the contemporaneous experiences of minimalist/ experimental composers and their purpose-built ensembles. Paul Hillier and Convergences of People and Approach The sympathy of approach and ideology between early music and minimalist/ experimental ensembles resulted in a convergence in the resultant performance practices that emerged over the 1960s and 1970s. Reich describes similarities in the approach to rhythm between early music and his music during the formative years of Steve Reich and Musicians (founded in 1966). I need musicians who have, and enjoy using, a strong rhythmic sense. Most early music shares with jazz, and most non-Western music, a fixed pulse. For a player to master such music and to find satisfaction in performing it, he or she must have a markedly firm sense of regular time and enjoy exercising it, in contrast to a player who prefers the more gestural rhythm found in German romantic music.27 Hillier’s account of performing Pärt’s choral music echoes similar issues from the perspective of early music:

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  51 A particular kind of choral instrument is best suited to Pärt’s music (and that of many other contemporary composers from Stravinsky on). That instrument is one in which the voices use minimal vibrato and project the music with great clarity and focus, but without loss of expressive colour, phrasing and dynamic variety. We find this kind of approach to choral sound in many of the best early-music groups … an early-music background is especially helpful in that it may encourage a style of phrasing and a manner of performance that are very appropriate to Pärt’s music.28 Hillier has built a distinctive career at the nexus of early music and minimalist repertoires, creating, since his foundation of the Hilliard Ensemble in 1974, a prolific and critically acclaimed body of recordings and writings about both historical and minimalist composers. But there has been a continuous overlap of performers (and performance practices) in these domains since at least the mid-1960s, when Rifkin performed in Cage’s marathon Vexations event in New York and Riley included recorders in his San Francisco premiere of In C.29 Steve Reich and Musicians has included soprano Cheryl Bensman (Waverley Consort and the Western Wind), percussionist Ben Harms (Waverly Consort, The New York Renaissance Band, Calliope, Boston Camerata, etc.), and percussionist Glen Velez (Ensemble for Early Music).30 Michael and Kay Jaffee, founders of the Waverly Consort in 1964, performed with viola da gamba player Judith Davidoff on Moondog’s double LP Moondog2 (1971), and Michael Nyman’s first ensemble, the Campiello Band (that would become the Michael Nyman Band), consisted of shawms, sackbuts, and rebecs next to bass drum and saxophone when it was formed in 1976.31 Finally, Louis Andriessen’s group Hoketus, formed at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague in 1977 (the Royal Conservatory also emerged as a hotbed of early music performance and training during the 1960s), didn’t utilize any performers associated with early music but was named after a compositional technique strongly associated with Medieval music.32 As Andriessen explains in the liner notes of the group’s first recording, The principal quality of minimal art compositions is the consistent limitation of musical material … Hoketus, too, has only one musical subject: the hocket. The hocket is a stylistic device of the Ars Nova (14th century, Machaut and others): the melodic tones are divided between two or more descants.33 Such cross-pollination continued through the end of the century and into our current millennium, with groups like the Hilliard Ensemble, viola da gamba consort Fretwork, vocal ensemble Lionheart, and many others performing and recording new minimalist and postminimalist music by a host of composers. LPs and a New Audience for “Social Context” Another formative site for the overlap of the worlds of early music and experimental/minimalist music are the activities of independent record labels Elektra,

52  Loren Ludwig Vanguard, and Vox. During the 1960s and 1970s these competing, New Yorkbased record companies released hundreds of LPs of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music on low-cost subsidiary labels Nonesuch (Elektra), Everyman (Vanguard), and Turnabout and Candide (Vox). Offering an eclectic mix of music at a lower price than mainstream classical labels, they relied heavily on licensing European recordings for American distribution and producing original recordings of lesser-known performers. In an interview in The New York Times in March 1965, Vanguard’s founder Seymour Solomon (a musicologist described by the Times as “baron of baroque”), discussed the meteoric rise in interest in Baroque music: “today [1965], some 40 per cent of Vanguard’s 1,000-item catalogue consists of baroque composers.”34 Solomon’s comments provide a useful snapshot of the market and cultural forces in the US that were driving the move to earlier repertoires. Among the factors cited by Solomon to explain “what brought Baroque back” were the development of the long-playing record, which made it possible for a modestly-capitalized company to get in the record business “without a topten record”; the advent of tape, which cut costs … ; the expansion of the nation’s leisure class, with its subsequent spawning of amateur Virtuosi who play in smaller, more intimate groups which are the hallmarks, generally, of baroque music … Also, much twentieth-century composition has been a revolt against overblown nineteenth-century music. It has led to a general look further back into the past. Solomon’s parting shot about the “revolt against overblown nineteenth-century music” anticipates similar comments by Reich, Glass, and others cited above as well as those by early music performers.35 But specific market conditions of the recording industry during the period also helped foster the unique cross-pollination of contemporary/minimalist music and early music. Post-War prosperity and technology—and in particular the widespread availability of commercial tape recorders and consumer transistor radios (introduced by Sony in 1954)—conspired to foster huge shifts in the production and consumption of music in the United States and around the world starting in the 1950s. That same decade saw the formation of dozens of independent record labels like Solomon’s Vanguard (founded in 1949) and Jac Holzman’s Elektra (founded in 1950) that catered to an increasingly sophisticated and diversified audience. As Rifkin (familiar from Cage’s Vexation event, described above), who recorded and wrote liner notes for Elektra’s Nonesuch label during its first decade, explains, “my generation and the generation immediately before, which was Jac [Holzman]’s, were the first to really grow up musically through recordings.”36 Like millions of his peers, Rifkin experienced the 1960s with a vinyl soundtrack, one that offered the Beatles and “British Invasion,” the American folk revival, experimental and synthesized music by artists like Cage, Morton Subotnik, and Wendy Carlos (whose 1968 album Switched on Bach would top the classical charts and reach tenth place on the Billboard 200 in 1969), as well as early music. In fact, early music repertories also made appearances in popular examples of all the preceding categories, from early British “progressive” rock

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  53 (Jethro Tull, Pentangle) to folk revival/early music syntheses (Sandy Bull, Davy Graham) to the seeming ubiquity of Bach on LPs of experimental electronic music. From the start, Vanguard’s Solomon and Elektra’s Holzman shared an enthusiasm for early music. Solomon, whose entry into the record industry in 1949 was prompted by his hope to expand the available recordings of J. S. Bach, would write a Ph.D. dissertation on Baroque composer Georg Muffat at New York University. Solomon’s brother Maynard, who worked closely with Seymour at Vanguard during its early years, would become a well-known musicologist.37 Elektra’s Holzman, who described himself as a “folkie,” had always been interested in early music, a fact attested by Elektra’s release of numerous early music recordings even before the launch of Nonesuch.38 What these labels largely lacked was the capital to record “name brand” ensembles, such as Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica Antiqua, which was releasing a steady stream of albums on the much better capitalized Decca and Columbia labels through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1963 Holzman had a realization that would substantially change the classical music recording industry in the US. This was that Elektra could buy the distribution rights to expensive European recordings and sell them to the growing American market for lowcost but eclectic music. Elektra’s subsidiary Nonesuch was launched in 1963 with LPs that cost $2.50, half the price customarily charged for classical records. What kind of music would Nonesuch offer? “Unusual, baroque oriented, with a very focused sense of audience,” Holzman recounts in Follow the Music, meaning essentially me as I was in 1948–1950. In sum, adventurous repertoire for music lovers with more taste than money. Package the line intelligently. Fashion liner notes that would not only discuss the music, but also—and this was important to me—the social context.39 From the vantage point of 2023, Holzman’s mention of “social context” may seem commonplace, but that may be precisely because Nonesuch’s (and its competitors’) offerings actually helped shape American audiences’ appreciation for the “social context” of early music. Certainly, musicologist Rifkin’s liner notes for Nonesuch’s early music releases and the Solomon brothers’ sophisticated programming and liner notes at Vanguard helped foster today’s “historically informed audience.” As Seymour Solomon recounted in 1965, there was a little bit of audience to start with but this, too, grew as more records came out … Vivaldi was a completely closed book; nobody but esoteric musicologists had ever heard of him. Today, there are about 300 recordings of Vivaldi, 16 of “The Four Seasons” alone.40 Early music enthusiasts’ thirst for “context,” and the industry’s willingness to provide it, serves as another important point of connection with experimental/ minimalist composers and performers—Cage, Glass, Reich, and many others have spoken and written at length to assist the public to understand and appreciate (initially) unfamiliar aesthetic and musical values.

54  Loren Ludwig Readers familiar with early music recordings on vinyl will likely be able to picture the brightly colored, fanciful album covers of Nonesuch’s and Turnabout’s releases from the 1960s and early 1970s. Designer William S. Harvey, hired by Elektra’s Holzman in 1958, would define the look of Elektra’s and Nonesuch’s visual brand, which tracked closely with the irreverent, psychedelic visual language that emerged as a key signifier of the 1960s counterculture. Harvey’s art would grace Elektra’s releases by the rock band Love, The Doors, MC5, and Judy Collins, as well as many of Nonesuch’s early music and experimental offerings.41 Harvey’s cover for Nonesuch’s 1965 Music from the Court of Burgundy, for example, exemplifies a look that anticipates both Terry Gilliam’s animation for Monty Python later in the decade and the bright colors and re-imagined aristocratic costumes of the iconic cover of the Beatles 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Their eclectic programming, hip packaging, and engaging, informative liner notes helped Vanguard, Elektra, and Vox find plenty of buyers for their early music offerings. In the 1965 New York Times interview, the “baron of baroque” (Solomon) brags that a Baroque record sells “anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 copies,” numbers that pale next to hit pop and rock record sales but that represented a reasonable return for the label considering the comparatively rock-bottom production costs. Elektra’s Nonesuch also proved to be a money maker. Holzman recalls that in Nonesuch’s first year we issued sixty records, selling in excess of a million units, and earned about $550,000 net, doubling our profitability. It’s one of those rare instances in the record business where success in the classical music area was so enormous that it could fund popular music.42 Nonesuch’s Theresa Sterne, Explorer of “Enormous Adventurousness” But marketing strategies that appealed to the creative democratization of “elite” art were just one way that the recording industry brought experimental musicians and composers into close contact with early music revivalists. In 1965 Holzman hired Theresa Sterne, then in her late 30s, to run Nonesuch. Sterne, a former pianist with close ties to many performers and composers, had cut her teeth in the record industry as an assistant to Vanguard’s Solomon.43 Sterne has yet to be broadly recognized for the importance of her role as tastemaker during the formative decades of the 1960s and 1970s and her pioneering work smashing the glass ceiling of the American recording industry.44 During her leadership at Nonesuch she discovered and/or encouraged such composers as Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, and George Crumb; such performers as the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani and pianists Rifkin and Gilbert Kalish; and Blachly’s early music group Pomerium and Arthur Weisberg’s Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Sterne’s legacy as a bridge between the worlds of early music and contemporary music is demonstrated in part by the strength of Nonesuch’s catalog during her own tenure as well as the identity she established for Nonesuch as a home for an eclectic mix of folk and early music revivalism, contemporary experimental and electronic music, and other music of questionable market potential. Without Nonesuch, it is

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  55 hard to imagine, for example, the success of the independent Munich label Edition of Contemporary Music (ECM), formed in 1969.45 In the 1970s ECM would release world premiere recordings of “classic” minimalism by Reich, Glass, Pärt, Meredith Monk, and others. Importantly, ECM encouraged collaboration between early and contemporary music with the prominent releases by Hillier discussed above. Starting in the late 1980s, Hillier’s Hilliard Ensemble added to their catalog of Medieval and Renaissance vocal music several discs of premieres by Pärt, including the minimalist compositions Passio and Miserere (released on ECM in 1988 and 1991, respectively), and in 1994 Hilliard (without Hillier) released on ECM Officium, a selection of works of Medieval and Renaissance chant and polyphony with saxophonist Jan Garbarek improvising descants using tenor and soprano saxophones.46 During the 1990s and early 2000s Hillier, whose stature as a performer and conductor of early music would only continue to grow, repeatedly collaborated with Reich, recording The Cave (Nonesuch 1995) and Proverb (Nonesuch 1996) and editing a collection of Reich’s essays, published as Writing on Music, 1965–2000 (Oxford 2002). Feet in Both Worlds: Blachly, Rifkin, and DeGaetani Returning to Nonesuch and Sterne’s New York, Blachly, Rifkin, and DeGaetani will be familiar to those conversant with the American early music revival. Blachly, who, along with Richard Taruskin, directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum in a series of influential performances during the early 1970s, would go on to direct Pomerium, one of the more prominent American early music vocal ensembles of the late twentieth century.47 Blachly’s work as scholar, singer, and ensemble director is all over Nonesuch’s releases of the 1970s, culminating in Pomerium’s release of its influential Ockeghem (1977) and Dufay (1979) recordings at the end of the decade. Blachly’s appearances on Nonesuch releases by Peter Maxwell Davies (1977) and, later, Glass (1993) attest less to a careerlong commitment to contemporary music and more to Sterne’s energetic eclecticism and the community she assembled during her tenure at Nonesuch. Rifkin, of course, was a key figure in a cultural moment that saw intersections between the folk and early revivals and the ubiquity of the Beatles. His “early music” arrangements supported Elektra’s hit records by folk singer Judy Collins, his Bach Beatles Book (Elektra, 1965) proved successful and influential, he directed the so-called “Nonesuch Consort” in numerous of the label’s early music releases, and he would write engaging liner notes for much of Nonesuch’s early music catalog during the 1960s and early 1970s. Even before his work with Elektra and Nonesuch (or, before that, his performance in Cage’s proto-minimalist 1963 Vexations performance), Rifkin was a creature of both old and new music. In a 2008 interview Rifkin recounted that, I have always been active in early music and the avant-garde alike. Indeed, it was in Darmstadt, while a seventeen-year-old kid in Stockhausen’s composition seminar, that I took out my subscription to the Neue Bach Ausgabe. For

56  Loren Ludwig more than a few of us, there was no contradiction between very new music and old music—quite the contrary. The Kuijkens and Robert Kohnen, for example, were new-music specialists early on—I’d love to have heard the Boulez Sonatine with Bart and Kohnen. Members of my own Bach Ensemble have been—and some of them still are—leading performers of very new music and my repertoire continues to include contemporary music. Someone once remarked that what binds the two areas together is that both demand a conscious choice from a young musician embarking on them—to depart from the standard path of mainstream repertoire and mainstream music making, to do something different.48 In conversations with Rifkin about whether minimalist music, in particular, had shaped the eclectic musical culture of the Nonesuch milieu during the 1960s, he recalled, I remember hearing the first tapes of Steve Reich’s Come Out, which were played to me by a Princeton composer colleague who had them fresh in from the coast (I think this was before the recording came out [in 1967]). And, of course, to come back to Terry Riley, the recording of In C [in 1968] is really what spread that particular news so widely. Before that it had really been only on the [West] coast and rumored about.49 Yet despite these experiences, Rifkin is reluctant to cede too much influence to the particular preoccupations of minimalist composers during the 1960s. Instead, he cites a broad opposition to Cold War modernist aesthetics among members of the diverse artistic community with whom he worked, as well as the signal importance of the Beatles as a creative catalyst. Another performer favored by Sterne, singer and pedagogue Jan DeGaetani, was known for her vocal virtuosity and championing of both early and contemporary music. DeGaetani, who in many ways charted what has emerged as a recognizable professional trajectory for vocalists who specialize in early and contemporary music, spent an entire year studying Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire after her graduation from Juilliard in 1955. DeGaetani would forge close relationships with many composers. George Crumb wrote his Ancient Voices of Children for her, and Jacob Druckman, Peter Maxwell Davies, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez all wrote music for her distinctive soprano voice. DeGaetani’s obituary in The New York Times reports that “her interest in new music made her a hero to the avantgarde, and she soon became a cult figure.”50 DeGaetani also made recordings of early music with New York Pro Musica and The Abbey Singers during the late 1950s and 1960s, and, later, the Waverly Consort during the 1970s. Nonesuch’s Sterne championed DeGaetani as a singer of contemporary music, and Nonesuch released a steady stream of influential recordings by DeGaetani (including what many consider the authoritative recording of Pierrot Lunaire in 1971 and, that same year, Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, which sold more than 70,000 copies) over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s. DeGaetani’s taste in contemporary

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  57 music, like Sterne’s, did not closely track with the emergence of minimalist music during the mid- to late 1960s; in fact, Sterne and DeGaetani championed works, like many by Ives, Crumb, and Carter, that exhibit the dense, modernist language that early minimalism reacted against. But, as noted earlier, such stylistic lines were less clearly demarcated during the 1960s, and the clarity and pitch accuracy of non-operatic singing, as well as the intelligence and curiosity that were required to make sense of both early and new repertories, were valuable to composers working in diverse styles. Soprano Dawn Upshaw, DeGaetani’s student at Aspen, rose to fame in part as a result of her 1992 recording (on Elektra/Nonesuch under the leadership Robert Hurwitz) of Henryk Górecki’s minimalist third symphony.51 That disc sold over a million copies in its first three years and, along with the work of Pärt (and especially Pärt’s collaborations with Hillier), helped establish “spiritual minimalism” as a key sound of the late twentieth century.52 Sterne’s tenure at Nonesuch (1965–1979) is striking for the vibrant community of performers, composers, scholars, and artists it included, representing a cross section of what was new and hip in New York during the 1960s. Nonesuch would continue to be an important home for early and minimalist music during subsequent decades. When Hurwitz joined Nonesuch in 1984, he inaugurated decades of Nonesuch releases by Reich and Glass (both of whom had had releases under Hurwitz at ECM) and added John Adams, Henryk Gorecki, and Robert Ashley to Nonesuch’s roster during the 1980s and 1990s. Among the eclectic artists that came to define Nonesuch under Hurwitz’s leadership was the Kronos Quartet, whose album Early Music (Lachrimae antiquae) in 1997 was notable for its high-profile combination of early and new music and distinctive string textures that came to represent, for many listeners, a synthesis of early and contemporary stringed-instrument performance practice. Conclusion Minimalist music emerged beginning in the 1950s and 1960s in New York, California, and London in close cultural and institutional proximity to the early music revival, and the two movements shared a community of adherents who responded in similar ways to the social and technological changes of the post-War period and in opposition to the modernist aesthetics of Romantic music. Similarly in need of new performance practices that better reflected the emergent aesthetic and cultural values of the moment, both early music revivalists and composers of minimalist music formed dozens of new chamber ensembles during the 1950s–1970s, groups that sought to make music that was transparent and rhythmically vital, that was performed on unfamiliar and diverse instruments, and that reflected an equality of musical parts and performers. In many cases these early and minimalist ensembles literally shared personnel, and numerous musicians recount a cross-pollination of early and experimental/minimalist music making during the period. The recording industry in New York, and particularly the independent labels Vanguard, Vox, and Elektra, became an important site for such intermingling, especially the activities of Teresa Sterne, the director of Elektra’s Nonesuch label from 1965 to 1979. Sterne’s

58  Loren Ludwig sophisticated and eclectic sensibility, coupled with the prominence and importance of Nonesuch to an emergent and growing market for interesting and diverse music in the US, resulted in a vibrant community of musicians representing contemporary and early music, folk revivalists, and music from around the world. Sterne’s development of the Nonesuch brand and roster established Elektra/Nonesuch as a label that would become an important home to American minimalist composers during subsequent decades and foster collaboration between early music practitioners and minimalist and postminimalist composers that continues into the current moment. Acknowledgment I would like to express warm gratitude to Joel Cohen, Rebecca Cypess, Emily Eagen, Allan Kozin, Larry Lipnik, Gene Murrow, John Mark Rozendaal, and Joshua Rifkin. Notes 1 Kailan Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings: Early Music and ‘1968,’” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237–254; Kirsten Yri, “Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front,” American Music 24, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 421–444. 2 David Fallows remarked that “if you went to a contemporary concert in the ’60s you saw the same people as you’d see at a medieval concert.” Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-Enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 64. See also Kailan Rubinoff’s contribution to the present volume. 3 Pwyll ap Siôn, “Reference and Quotation in Minimalist and Postminimalist Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1. 4 Harold C. Schonberg, “Music: A Long, Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano,” The New York Times, September 11, 1963, 45. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Quoted in ap Siôn, “Reference and Quotation in Minimalist and Postminimalist Music,” 2. 8 Wilson, The Art of Re-Enchantment, 216. 9 Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 3. 10 The use of hocket is also a widely cited Medieval compositional technique embraced by composers of post-War minimalist music. 11 Potter, Gann, and ap Siôn, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Post-Minimalist Music, 332. 12 Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 50. 13 Richard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music College Edition [Instructor’s Edition] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1082. 14 See, for example, Reich’s description of Music for 18 Musicians (1976): “This means that each chord might have taken 15 or 20 seconds to play in the opening section is then stretched out as the basic pulsing harmony for a five-minute piece, very much as a single note in a cantus firmus or chant melody of a twelfth-century organum by Perotin might be stretched out for several minutes as the harmonic center for a section of organum.” Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 89.

Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival  59 15 Alfred Mann, J. Kenneth Wilson, and Peter Urquhart. “Canon (i),” Grove Music Online, https://www​.oxfordmusiconline​.com​/grovemusic​/view​/10​.1093​/gmo​/9781561592630​ .001​.0001​/omo​-9781561592630​-e​-0000004741 (accessed October 27, 2021). 16 Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 34. 17 Ronald Woodley, “Steve Reich’s Proverb, Canon, and a Little Wittgenstein,” in Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, ed. Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn (Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2007), 407–420. 18 Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 5. 19 Walter Zimmermann, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians (Vancouver, BC: Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, 1976), 108. 20 Taruskin and Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music College Edition [Instructor’s Edition], 1071. 21 David Krasnow, “Julia Wolfe by David Krasnow,” October 1, 2001, Bomb Magazine 77 (October 1, 2001), https://bombmagazine​.org​/articles​/julia​-wolfe/ (accessed November 20, 2022). 22 Paul Winter and Winter Consort, Something in The Wind (A&M Records, 1969, SP-4207). The Winter Consort included various early music revivalists during its early years, including lutenist Gene Murrow and percussionist Glen Velez. 23 Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 157. 24 In 1970 Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien released the first recording of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion using historical instruments; see Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Johann Sebastian Bach: Matthäus-Passion (Telefunken, 1971, SAWT 9572/75-A). 25 Nikolaus Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue: Thoughts on Monteverdi, Bach and Mozart (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1984), 73. 26 Harnoncourt, The Musical Dialogue, 73. 27 Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 156. 28 Arvo Pärt, Collected Choral Works, Introduced by Paul Hillier (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1999). 29 Taruskin and Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music College Edition [Instructor’s Edition], 1071. 30 Reich, Writings on Music 1965–2000, 156. 31 Maarten Beirens, “Minimalist Techniques from a European Perspective: An Analysis of Pour que les fruits mûrissent cet été by Karel Goeyvaerts,” Revue Belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 57 (2003): 216. 32 Kailan Rubinoff is now at work on a forthcoming history of the Dutch early music movement that will discuss this issue. 33 Louis Andriessen, De Staat / Il Principe / Il Duce / Hoketus (Netherlands: Composers’ Voice, 1977, CV-7702). Prior to his interest in minimalist music, Andriessen had composed recorder pieces for Frans Brüggen. Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings,” 247. 34 Richard F. Shepard, “Wanted: Composers, Talented, 300-Years Old,” The New York Times (March 7, 1965), X23. 35 See, for example, comments by John Butt and Bruce Haynes quoted in Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings.” 36 Joshua Rifkin, interview with Loren Ludwig, October 23, 2021. 37 Shepard, “Wanted.” 38 Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture (Santa Monica, CA: FirstMedia Books, 2000), ebook location 3455. 39 Holzman and Daws, Follow the Music, ebook location 3375. 40 Quoted in Shepard, “Wanted: Composers, Talented.” 41 Cary Ginell, “Elektra Records and the Development of Album Cover Art (1951–1970).” Presentation for the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Seattle, WA, 2006.

60  Loren Ludwig Abstracted at https://www​.arsc​-audio​.org​/conference​/2006​/pdf​/abstracts​-for​-website​ .pdf (accessed November 20, 2022). 42 Holzman and Daws, Follow the Music, ebook location 3537. 43 Anthony Tommasini, “Teresa Sterne, 73, Pioneer in Making Classical Records,” The New York Times, December 12, 2000, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2000​/12​/12​/arts​/teresa​ -sterne​-73​-pioneer​-in​-making​-classical​-records​.html (accessed November 20, 2022). 44 In 2000 Nonesuch’s Robert Hurwitz issued a two-disc set (Teresa Sterne: A Portrait, Nonesuch, 2000, 79619-2) commemorating both Sterne’s early career as a performer and her work as a producer for the label. 45 See Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths, Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM (London: Granta, 2007). 46 Hillier published a monograph on Arvo Pärt in 1997 with Oxford University Press, and the Hilliard Ensemble has released several follow-up collaborations with Garbarek on ECM. 47 Taruskin appears on several Nonesuch releases of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Nonesuch’s 1969 release of its commission of composer Eric Salzman’s The Nude Paper Sermon: Tropes for Actor, Renaissance Consort, Chorus, And Electronics (Nonesuch H-71231, 1969). Taruskin’s recorded work would move to Musical Heritage Society and Collegium Records (which released the live performances of the Columbia University Collegium Musicum). 48 Uri Golomb, “Interview with Joshua Rifkin,” Goldberg Early Music Magazine 51 (2008): 31. 49 Joshua Rifkin, interview with Loren Ludwig, October 23, 2021. Terry Riley’s release of In C on Columbia Records was produced by composer David Behrman, who overlapped with Rifkin at Darmstadt in the late 1950s. See Terry Riley, In C (Columbia Masterworks, 1968, MS-7178). 50 Harold C. Schonberg, “Jan DeGaetani, 56, Singer of Avant-Garde Works,” The New York Times (September 17, 1989), https://www​.nytimes​.com​/1989​/09​/17​/obituaries​/jan​ -degaetani​-56​-singer​-of​-avant​-garde​-works​.html (accessed November 20, 2022). 51 Robert Hurwitz, “Tracey and Me,” essay in the booklet to accompany the audio recording Teresa Sterne: A Portrait (Nonesuch, 2000, 79619-2), 44. 52 David Dies, “Defining ‘Spiritual Minimalism,’” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Post-Minimalist Music, 315–336.

4

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation Reading Pre-Twentieth-Century Scores through the Lens of an Avant-Garde Notation David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess

The emergence of graphic notation in the mid-twentieth century constituted an apparent response to the growing frustration with the limits of conventional Western musical notation. In many instances, graphic notation used pictorial representation to spur new kinds of interpretation from performers, inviting more freedom in their sonic responses to the notated “text,” and thus greater performative agency. In the decades since its emergence, the tradition of graphic notation has developed in ever more creative, sometimes uncanny directions, with composers such as John Cage, Cathy Berberian, and Mark Applebaum using squiggles, cartoons, and hand-drawn pictographs on 72-foot-wide panels to elicit a wide—indeed, potentially infinite— range of responses. At its heart, then, graphic notation problematizes the relationship between composer and performer that was long seen as an inherent component of conventional Western notation. While the forms of graphic notation used by Cage, Berberian, and Applebaum are surely modern, the use of pictorial representation as a metaphor for musical performance can be seen in notated repertoire from centuries past. Although it may be counterintuitive to draw conclusions about early music based on modern aesthetics and practices, we propose that viewing early music through the lens of graphic notation may open new pathways to understand the relationship between notation and performance in that early repertoire. In these earlier examples, too, the issue of the composer’s control as balanced with the performer’s freedom and flexibility is of primary importance. In many cases, composers used pictorial representation as a means of signaling performerly flexibility and individualized interpretation. Examples include ornamentation symbols in the keyboard repertoire of the French and German Baroque, which were often used because their execution required flexibility that could not be captured in conventional notation. Basso continuo figures, too, can be understood as a pictorial shorthand that refrained from dictating the specific voicing or voice leading of chordal accompaniment; likewise, it avoided prescribing instrumentation, allowing the performers to determine timbres and instrumental combinations. Composers sometimes introduced individualized representations like ornamental flourishes that simply indicate “play an improvisational passage here.” Wavy lines sometimes appear to suggest the overall spirit of a performance, leaving the precise means by which that spirit is achieved DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-6

62  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess to the judgment of the performer. Through such pictorial representations, composers of earlier centuries manipulated and added to conventional notation to elicit responses from performers reading their texts. Composers sometimes employed unconventional pictorial representations of music apparently to dictate parameters of musical performance that could not be captured and communicated clearly through standard staff notation. For example, articulation marks such as slurs, dots, and wedges can be understood as pictorial representations of musical sound, and these show the composer using a notational system that conveys greater specificity than is normally allowed. A pair of hairpins (that is, a crescendo “fork” followed immediately by a decrescendo “fork”), as another example, can denote emphasis on a musical phrase. In some cases, composers even used typographical elements such as smaller or larger noteheads to clarify voice leading and compositional structure.1 Even in these cases, as we will show, the composers appear to have been seeking a flexible, individualized response from performers that clearly echoes what is sought by modern composers who use graphic notation. This chapter asks what can be learned by seeking out the spirit of graphic notation in pre-twentieth-century Western music. Consideration of the pictorial aspects of musical notation offers a fruitful avenue through which to explore the relationship between composer and performer and the level of control and agency exerted by both. Following a discussion of these issues as theorized by mid-twentieth-century avantgarde composers and their heirs in the twenty-first century, we will turn to a series of case studies that highlight the continuity of issues in graphic notation between modern and earlier repertoires. Ultimately, we argue, looking at music from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries through the lens of graphic notation helps to elucidate aspects of performance practice that might otherwise go undetected. Performers’ Agency and Graphic Notation in the Twentieth-Century Avant Garde John Cage articulated the need for an expanded method of notating music long before “graphic notation” came into being. Speaking in 1937 to the Seattle Arts Society, Cage said, “The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound.”2 For Cage, conventional means of encoding pitch, rhythm, and meter on paper were too limiting: if sound itself was meant to be the subject matter of his work, and notation an unambiguous reflection thereof, then the apparently impoverished notational system Cage had inherited required updating. Cage himself had a shifting relationship with graphic notation over the course of his long career, especially because he understood graphic notation as a means to endow performers with greater flexibility and control over the realization of the composition than was enabled by other forms of notation. In some instances, he fully embraced the open-endedness that graphic notation seemed able to convey. For example, in that same lecture for the Seattle Arts Society, he spoke approvingly of new directions in percussion notation:

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  63 Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music.3 In other contexts, Cage viewed performers as imperfect vessels for the realization of his ideas as a composer. Discussing sound synthesized via electronic instruments, Cage celebrated the fact that “it is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers.”4 And he viewed music beyond the capacities of human performance as entirely legitimate: Since so many inches of tape equal so many seconds of time, it has become more and more usual that notation is in space rather than in symbols of quarter, half, and sixteenth notes and so on. Thus where on a page a note appears will correspond to when in a time it is to occur. When one critic remarked “I have noticed that you write durations that are beyond the possibility of performance,” Cage replied, “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?”5 Cage’s skepticism toward graphic notation stemmed in part from his turn toward aleatoric compositional methods. Although the visually stimulating means of graphic notation are meant to stir performers’ imagination to generate unique interpretations, many of them also serve the practical purpose of managing aleatoric performance. Leaving certain parameters of performance up to chance through indeterminate figures or directions meant that no two performances of one of these scores are identical. Yet, in some cases, aleatoric compositional techniques necessitated a highly determinate approach to performance. Thus, in Cage’s Music of Changes, the aleatoric compositional process leads to a strictly subservient role on the part of the performer. As Cage wrote, “the Music of Changes is an object more inhuman than human.”6 Still, Cage’s interest in graphic notation is reflected in his role in assembling, with Alison Knowles, a volume titled Notations, which contained graphic scores by 269 composers from the mid-twentieth century.7 This monumental collection shows the degree to which graphic notation had surged in popularity among many composers of that era, including Cage himself, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown. The editor of a companion volume, Notations 21 (2009), Theresa Sauer, cites Cage in associating graphic notation with performative agency: With the development of graphic scores and innovative notation comes an expansion of artistic freedom … To quote John Cage on improvisation: “My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard. I don’t hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I have [not] yet heard.”8 For Sauer, the fundamental purpose of graphic notation is to elicit flexibility from performers:

64  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess Composers who choose to make innovations in the field of notation or graphic scores represent various compositional ideals, as reflected in their philosophies. Their philosophies encompass the desire to improve communication amongst composers, performers, and audiences, to develop a wholly different language to encourage creative improvisation, and to challenge the way we understand music and sound.9 Pauline Oliveros and Earle Brown embraced graphic notation for its associated performative openness. Oliveros’s Anthology of Text Scores consists of a collection of algorithmic compositions, which uses texts or diagrams as a recipe for performers to create noise and pitches through improvisation. Her method is to “move from traditional note-bound composition to a freer area of music making that is reliant on ways of listening and responding.”10 By using familiar text and symbols from foreign to conventional staff notation, graphic and indeterminate scores can, ironically, provide greater clarity for a wider range of interpreters. Reflecting on her first algorithmic composition, which consisted entirely of text, Oliveros wrote, “Sonic Meditations allowed me to include and mix trained and non-trained musicians. Simple instructions can lead to quite complex musical structures. Students with no musical training were able to participate effectively—sometimes better than trained musicians.”11 This approach made it possible for musicians who could not read conventional staff notation to realize the Sonic Meditations, as inscribed in the piece’s introduction: “No special skills are necessary.”12 Yet, as Oliveros notes, these algorithmic pieces can produce complex musical structures and possibilities. Earle Brown viewed the score not as a static object, but as a means of artistic creation. In this sense, it seems, Brown considered the score a “verb” rather than a “noun”—a concept that we borrow from Christopher Small.13 Referring to his work December 1952, Brown explained that he was seeking to capture the score’s “conceptual mobility—which is to say the performer’s mental approach to the piece.”14 While December 1952 took shape as “a single page, something like a photograph of a certain set of relationships of these various horizontal and vertical elements,” his idea of the piece originated as a box which would sit on top of the piano and these things would be motorized, in different gearings and different speeds, and so forth, so that the vertical and horizontal elements would actually physically be moving in front of the pianist. The motorized elements in this box would stimulate responses on the part of the performer. Thus, Brown’s notion of the score as a means of individualized performerly creation had its roots in an ever-changing visual stimulus—a score in motion. The graphic notation on the page simply freezes these objects in space. Brown’s idea of graphic notation as encompassing “conceptual mobility,” “the performer’s mental approach to the piece,” is apposite as we turn our attention to the thought experiment at the heart of this essay: what if we were to think of

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  65 graphic notation as a phenomenon in Western music from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries? This thought experiment involves looking with fresh eyes at aspects of notation that might seem quite ordinary. We seek to defamiliarize these seemingly ordinary aspects of notation—from hairpins to articulation markings to basso continuo figures and ornament symbols—to understand just how novel they were when first introduced and how central they were to the process of performing music in centuries past. With Brown, we view the score more as a verb than a noun: rather than being an object representing some fixed, predetermined, definite sound, the score is viewed as a prompt to creativity. The elements discussed thus far establish what we call the ethos of graphic notation: as theorized by avant-garde composers of the twentieth century, graphic notation seems designed primarily to elicit active participation by performers—to garner creativity and individuality in the interpretation of the score. The ethos of graphic notation is a productive lens through which to view music from earlier periods. In Western music of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, composers used unconventional visual stimuli to prompt individual interpretation of their scores. Even in cases where they sought greater specificity than was allowed by conventional staff notation, they often did so with a view to promoting the use of flexible interpretive means such as tempo rubato, rhythmic flexibility, improvised ornamentation, and flexible phrasing. In the sections that follow, we will explore a series of examples from contemporary music and earlier repertoire that highlight the usefulness of this perspective across time periods. The Ethos of Graphic Notation in Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Music Instances of pictorial notation in early music have long been identified as precursors to twentieth-century graphic notation; best known, perhaps, is the use of pictorial notation by fourteenth-century composers Baude Cordier and Jaquemin de Senleches. As Jane Alden has observed, “The visual pictorialism of these pieces makes it clear that they were intended to be read by the eye as much as heard with the ear.”15 However, Alden observes a crucial difference in function between these examples as the use of graphic notation by Earle Brown and his colleagues: while Cordier and Senleches used pictorial representation in a way that does not seem to bear implications for flexibility or open-endedness in performance, “Brown sought to show that the visual identity of a score could be reconciled with a flexible range of performances.” The same may be said of other types of early notation that conveyed information to the eye as well as to the ear: this “eye music” (Augenmusik) notation did not always convey information about performance.16 In other words, not all pictorial music encompasses what we have called the ethos of graphic notation. In other cases of music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this ethos does manifest itself. As Oliveros and her avant-garde colleagues observed, conventional staff notation was effective at indicating certain elements of performance, but less effective at others. Parameters such as rhythmic flexibility are less easily conveyed, and this can affect everything from the performance of ornaments

66  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess to whole passages that need to be accelerated or decelerated in keeping with the character of the moment. In other cases, notation can only gesture at the specific execution of parameters such as dynamic nuance or rhetorical articulation. Searching for the ethos of graphic notation in early music sheds light on instances in which composers from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries pushed beyond conventional staff notation to elicit flexible, individualized responses from performers. In these instances, pictorial representations assume a metaphorical status, in that they represent aspects of performance that cannot be notated literally. In this sense, notation serves as a catalyst—an invitation to creativity. Performers’ agency is a familiar issue to practitioners of the historical performance movement. Many such practitioners view it as an advantage that performers have the onus and privilege of interpreting the score in a way that was not explicitly notated by the composer. As Barthold Kuijken explains, We should bear in mind that in actual performance musicians were often required to add their own unique layer of interpretation, which could or even should be different each time the work was played. Without this essential and creative performer-provided contribution, the audience would hear an incomplete piece.17 For Kuijken, as for many other HIP performers, this “performer-provided contribution” should be informed by contextual evidence gleaned from sources such as treatises on performance and experience with historical instruments; otherwise, the interpretation risks exceeding the bounds of “good taste.” In practice, however, the interpretations that HIP performers create today often vary wildly, and the limits of “good taste” are difficult to pin down precisely. The relationship between composer and performer was one of which musicians of eighteenth-century Europe were intensely aware. When Johann Adolph Scheibe criticized the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, he did so by claiming that Bach had overstepped his role as a composer: “Every ornament, every little grace, and everything that one thinks of as belonging to the method of playing, he expresses completely in notes.”18 In Bach’s defense, Abraham Birnbaum argued that the Capellmeister was merely instructing performers who lacked the training and judgment to invent ornaments on their own: If all such [performers] were sufficiently instructed in that which is truly beautiful in the manner [of ornamentation]; if they always knew how to employ it where it might serve as a true ornament and particular emphasis of the main melody; in that case it would be superfluous for the composer to write down in notes once more what they already knew.19 François Couperin was another eighteenth-century composer who sought greater control over how performers executed ornaments in their music than convention generally allowed. Like many French composers of his day, Couperin provided an ornament table in his Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (1717) that showed how each ornament symbol should be interpreted. The ornaments themselves function

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  67 as pictorial symbols representing a variety of possible solutions. Couperin allows for a different number of oscillations in his trill, mordent, and appoggiatura; the duration of a trill might vary according to the duration of the note being ornamented or the character and tempo of the piece. In his treatise L’Art de toucher le clavecin, published in the same year, Couperin gives a hint as to why these ornament symbols were used at all; why did composers not simply write out the trills and other ornaments in the way they wanted them performed? He explains that ornaments cannot be executed evenly or monotonously but must rather be executed flexibly: Trills of any considerable length are comprised of three components, which are not the same in performance as in appearance. 1. The accent, which should be placed on the note above the main note. 2. The oscillations. 3. The stopping point.20 He provides a pictorial example in which a half note, a series of sixteenth notes, and a final eighth note stand in for each of these three components. Yet even this differentiated illustration is not enough: “Although the trills are written in equal note values in the table of ornaments in my first book, they should, however, begin more slowly than they end, but this gradation should be imperceptible.” This explanation suggests that ornament symbols were used precisely because they could convey the flexibility that a simple series of sixteenth or thirty-second notes could not. In this sense, the pictorial representation of ornaments may be understood as a type of graphic notation. The ethos of graphic notation may be applied to early music in more than just the domain of ornaments. Seventeenth-century harpsichord repertoire provides ample evidence that composers and printers were heavily interested in the pictorial aspects of their notated scores. The notation of chordal accompaniment in Italy around the turn of the seventeenth century, for instance, took several notational forms, all apparently intended to capture a practice that could not be represented adequately in conventional staff notation. In some cases, chordal accompaniment was notated with apparent precision on staves: for example, Luzzasco Luzzaschi’s Madrigali per cantare e sonare a 1, 2, e 3 voci (1601) purports to represent accompaniments to madrigals through a keyboard intabulation that guides the player’s fingers through harmony and voice leading, even as it doubles most of the material in the vocal parts. At the same time, composers began notating chordal accompaniment using only basso continuo figures. Many of these composers admitted that their use of these practices was justified by convenience—an acknowledgment that confirmed the fear of Adriano Banchieri and others who warned that basso continuo represented a way out of the difficult practice of reading open scores that preserved the contrapuntal integrity of keyboard music. Giulio Caccini, in the preface to his Nuove musiche (1602), fully admitted that he was moving away from formal counterpoint. In his new system, Caccini wrote, “counterpoint is not necessary; indeed I used it only to make the two parts agree.”21 Thus it was not just convenience that led composers like Caccini to move away from either open

68  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess score notation or intabulations like those used by Luzzaschi: rather, basso continuo figures provided composers with a means of conveying a degree of flexibility in performance that could simply not be captured through conventional notation. The numeric system of basso continuo can be understood as a form of graphic notation: it circumvented the apparent specificity of conventional staff notation and offered room for greater flexibility. The notation of so-called “unmeasured” preludes of seventeenth-century France may likewise be thought of as a kind of graphic notation. The earliest examples of this genre were notated and preserved only in manuscript; the manner of their notation included what appear to be whole notes but in fact communicate no information about rhythmic duration. These “white” notes, together with the curved and diagonal lines that accompanied them, as well as their harmonic content and layout on the page, conveyed information about phrasing that would have been clear to those trained in this cryptic notational system. When these pieces made their way into mass-produced, engraved volumes, the notation needed to become closer to the standard and thus more accessible to potential purchasers; thus, composers and engravers developed a compromise system that incorporated both white notes and notes with clear rhythmic values that would help readers understand the system of interpretation. Georg Philipp Telemann clearly intended to convey aspects of performance practice through pictorial elements in his Gulliver’s Travels Suite, TWV 40, for two violins. This suite includes, among its five movements, a “Lilliputsche Chaconne” and a “Brobdingnagische Gigue,” representing the miniature Lilliputians and gargantuan Brobdingnagians from Jonathan Swift’s novel. The Lilliputians are represented by the unusual 3/32 time signature and humorously fast notes that are squashed together on the page, suggesting a sense of energy and urgency (Figure 4.1). The Brobdingnagian music, by contrast, is in 24/1 and entirely in whole notes, thus indicating a lethargy befitting the giants’ stature. Beyond asserting his currency with literary trends, Telemann may have used the pictorial elements of this notation to prompt performers to create individual interpretations. The notation might affect every parameter of interpretation, from tempo and accentuation patterns to timbre—a parameter of performance that is notoriously difficult to convey in writing. The Lilliputian music might be not only fast but also squeaky or shrill, while the Brobdingnagian music could be not just slow but also heavy, barking, and galumphing. These pictorial representations expand performers’ interpretive choices and evoke responses that could not be suggested through conventional staff notation. Francesco Geminiani shared Couperin’s frustration that certain aspects of performance could not be captured through conventional staff notation, and he resorted to inventing new pictorial images to capture aspects of sound. For example, Geminiani’s Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick contains not just standard ornaments but also original symbols for “swelling and falling the sound.”22 Moreover, Geminiani was frustrated in his attempts to notate “the close shake”— that is, vibrato—which “cannot possibly be described by notes.” Yet Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach did just that when he used a slur with a series of dots underneath

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  69

Figure 4.1  Georg Philipp Telemann, “Lilliputsche chaconne,” from Die getreue MusicMeister welcher so wol für Sänger als Instrumentalisten allerhand Gattungen musicalischer Stück (Hamburg: Telemann, 1728), 32. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica​.bnf​.fr.

(what string players such as Leopold Mozart used to denote portato) to indicate clavichord vibrato, or Bebung. Luigi Boccherini may have intended to notate portato when he placed a wavy line over his string parts. Its connection with repeated notes in Boccherini’s music suggests that he sought to evoke a sense of breathlessness. The precise realization, however, is up to each performer. Can Notational Specificity in the Nineteenth Century Be Reconsidered as Graphic Notation? It is a commonplace of Western music history that composers in the nineteenth century became increasingly specific in their notation, directing performers with increasing clarity toward a single, “correct” interpretation of each composition. From this tendency, it might seem that performers’ agency and room for individual interpretation became increasingly constrained. Yet consideration of specific cases from the nineteenth century through the lens of the ethos of graphic notation yields a more complex picture. Consider the brilliant opening run in bar 4 of Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (Example 4.1). To play each note of this lick in tune and at impressive speed as part of the violin’s bold opening has posed a daunting challenge for many hard-practicing violinists. Hearing it done well, live in concert, is a spine-tingling thrill. Sarasate himself recorded this piece—a circumstance that potentially offers a nearly unique opportunity to hear one of the premier virtuosi violinists of the nineteenth-century recording a signature showpiece—yet his recording reveals that something else is going on. Zigeunerweisen was one of Sarasate’s hits, and the easy assumption is that it was loaded with tricks peculiarly suited to Sarasate’s skillset. Any expectation of a stunningly brilliant opening scalar run in his recording, however, is

70  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess

Example 4.1  Pablo de Sarasate, Zigeunerweisen, op. 20 (1878), bars 1–4.

disappointed: as he played it, the upward figure is, astonishingly, not a display of brilliant virtuosity, but an incipient scale that dissolves into a glissando!23 Whatever reservations one might have about recording quality (the high notes are difficult to make out) or the performers’ seriousness (the slow section is omitted and a voice calls out to usher in the cut), Sarasate’s left-hand technique cannot be in question given the skill in evidence later on this recording. More to the point, the impression is not of a violinist who found a cheat halfway through a bungled run, but rather of a performer who never had a sincere interest in playing the notes as written. For any conservatory-trained musician, this is unthinkable. The requirement of literal fidelity is generally considered absolute; any violinist who walks into an audition, masterclass, or lesson (it would never happen in concert, as no one would engage such a violinist) and performs this as a half-glissando will be immediately dismissed. From the perspective of graphic notation, though, Sarasate’s reading is perfectly understandable. That is, if one of graphic notation’s goals is to provide abstract notational forms that deny specificity, Sarasate’s notation can be understood as a notational specification best understood as an abstraction. In other words, even though it appears specific, this run is actually a prompt to performerly invention. Sarasate, unlike Mozart,24 could not merely sketch in a few shorthand notes but was instead required to produce a notation that accorded with the definitions and limitations of contemporary notations and typesets. There is no standard notation for a parti​al-sc​ale-t​hat-m​elts-​into-​a-gli​ssand​o, so Sarasate opted to write out the formidable-looking lick. The requirement for today’s musician, then, is to “overcome their conservatory training”25 and, when encountering Sarasate’s notation, understand that apparently specific notations are better understood as forms that arose from musical ideas. Another example of the notational “unlearning” that can be prompted by the ethos of graphic notation comes in the form of Rachmaninoff’s use of hairpins (crescendo or diminuendo “forks”). As David Hyun-su Kim has shown with respect to Brahms, hairpins are best understood not as denotative markings requiring that the music “grow louder/softer,” but rather as symbols connoting “becoming more/ less.”26 More/less can be achieved through a variety of performative means—not just dynamics—and hairpins are particularly associated with agogic inflections.27 Rachmaninoff’s own recording of the G♭ Prelude provides a good example. Here, the right hand’s repeated eighth-note figure is rhythmically altered so much that a transcription would be correct to notate a dotted-eighth.28 A more challenging example comes at the opening of the A-minor Etude tableau, in which the second figure is marked with a diminuendo alongside a crescendo hairpin leading to

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  71 a sforzando minor tonic chord.29 Reading the diminuendo as “grow softer” and the crescendo hairpin as “grow louder” would be nonsense. But understanding the hairpin as a graphic symbol connoting expressive increase (rather than a strictly dynamic one) might well explain Rachmaninoff’s own recording of bar 3: the triplets become quieter, but also much slower before arriving on the bar 4 downbeat.30 Here, as with the Sarasate, it is useful to consider Rachmaninoff’s situation as it presages what interpreters must do when thoughtfully performing pieces by others. Having had the idea of an initially explosive gesture (mm. 1–2) followed by a menacing, obscuring repetition, a notation needed to be landed upon. A ritardando might imply a slackening, release, or closure, so Rachmaninoff needed to find an alternative. A hairpin works in that it implies direction (drive towards the bar 4 downbeat) as well as growing intensity; but it only works if read by a non-literalist musician who can apply creative agency through several performative parameters. That notation should be understood in this way can be argued for from historical sources, records, documents, etc. The lens of graphic notation offers another—perhaps more intuitive—angle. This point is made clear through consideration of the work of Mark Applebaum, one of the contemporary composers most active in the graphic notation of music today. In 2008, Applebaum produced a 72-foot-wide, hand-drawn, pictographic score for a piece called The Metaphysics of Notation.31 The composer “vowed never to perform [the piece], precisely in hopes of not suggesting authorial precedent.”32 Applebaum claims no “authoritative” voice, viewing his role as composer to spark creativity. In the handbook that accompanies The Metaphysics of Notation, he refers to a “downward glissando of materializing rectangles”33 in the score of this piece, as well as an “upward sloping diagonal.”34 The former strongly resembles Sarasate’s bar 4 lick (only upside-down and with rectangles rather than notes), and Applebaum even notes that another diagonal (which, again, visually resembles Sarasate’s score) is “potentially a portamento.”35 Applebaum’s handbook for The Metaphysics of Notation also refers to circles that “grow in size, thus indicating the occurrence of augmentation.”36 This is intuitive, and, from the perspective of graphic notation, the link to nineteenth-century hairpin notation is direct and obvious: an increase in a symbol’s size (like a crescendo hairpin) maps directly to some sort of augmentation. And if hairpins are understood as connotative—or graphic—in that they refuse denotative specification, this augmentation can then draw on any number of musical vectors, including dynamics, duration, accentuation, timbre, character, etc. Such an example nicely clarifies what a traditional approach to notation overlooks: while a literal approach to notation perceives only what has been pre-defined, an approach informed by graphic notation requires that we also ask what might yet be defined. Similarly, Applebaum’s composition Control Freak (2015) seems to take up Couperin’s challenge of notating ornaments and brings it almost to an absurd conclusion. Applebaum notates ornaments with precision, using both curved and angular lines to indicate the speed and progression of the trills. In Figure 4.2, he indicates that the trill speed should change from faster oscillations to slower oscillations. The size and shape of the curves give a clear indication of how this ornament should

72  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess

Figure 4.2  Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing one type of trill in Control Freak (2015). Reproduced by permission of the composer.

Figure 4.3  Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing another type of trill in Control Freak (2015). Reproduced by permission of the composer.

be executed, showing through visual representation what Couperin was at pains to either notate or describe. By contrast, in Figure 4.3, the trill sits on the base note longer than the trilled note, but the pulse should be regular. The aural outcome of this trill would be something similar to a dotted rhythm, yet notating a slurred dotted rhythm would not be suitable for this context, because it would emphasize the meter over ornament. This inventive notation thus pioneers a new sound—a hybrid between a trill and a dotted rhythm that embraces the ornamental quality of the trill while sustaining the regular pulse of the dotted rhythm. Despite this specificity, the same example reveals Applebaum’s commitment to performerly flexibility. One of the similarities that can be seen in the trill examples in Applebaum’s score and the ornament tables by Baroque composers is that the given trills resemble the shape of a sine wave, which is now commonly associated with the frequency and amplitude of a sound wave. By making this visual connection, performers realizing these scores may be tempted to focus their attention on the sound itself, rather than just the motions in their hands or vocal cords to achieve the trill. The visual cue can be a subtle reminder that the trill is affecting the resonance of a moving and living sound, rather than the simple coordination of two pitches. Although sine waves are one way to interpret this type of notation, it can essentially represent any entity that the performer feels it resembles, whether it be a bird call, a spiral, or an electrocardiogram; these analogies unfold playful possibilities, which would ultimately influence the execution of these notes. Furthermore, these symbols raise awareness for the context of the piece, because the shapes serve as a reminder to consider the shape of the piece as a whole. The trill symbols by Applebaum and earlier composers are more specific and elaborate than the simple indication of “tr.” Although this means the direction is more controlled and detailed, the result is an approach by the performer that is more likely to be free and nuanced. This type of “organized freedom” is one of the important paradoxes that the notation calls upon; as Applebaum himself describes regarding Control Freak, the interpretation “requires a very special kind of virtuoso musician, one who is playful and imaginative, capable at once of the utmost discipline and whimsy.”37

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  73 The graphic intuitiveness of markings such as trills and glissandos underscores that traditional notation was generated by human effort. Graphic notation is in this sense a reaction not to notation itself, but rather to the prescriptive modern attitude towards an orthography that was previously in perpetual negotiation. One trace of this negotiation can be found on the opening page and instructions in the earlier, Richault edition of Liszt’s “Au bord d’une source.” The “key” at the bottom indicates that the filled-in horizontal bars indicate a “decrescendo” of movement, while a box or unfilled-in bar indicates a “crescendo” of movement. This single example illustrates many things. First, it is an illustration of a composer experimenting with notation; for Liszt, notation was less an ossified monolith and more nearly a living interaction point with the player. Second, it indicates that notating rhythmic inflections was an open question; the absence of such markings in subsequent notation suggests that the question was never fully answered. Finally, it is an illustration of graphically intuitive and correlative notation. A filled-in horizontal bar indicating a “hold” is graphically direct (and “tenuto” is itself derived from tenere, meaning “to hold”); extending that bar to indicate a longer “hold” is the graphically logical next step. If scores are not ossified bearers of predefined symbols, one perspective that avant-garde graphic notation enables is to view them as entirely graphic. That they are highly cultivated and part of an established tradition frequently obscures this possibility, but if we bear, say, the ludic and evocative comic strips of Cathy Berberian in mind, this perspective is easier to hold.38 Consider, for instance, Chopin’s beloved E♭ Nocturne, op. 9, no. 2. Here, a straightforward, “play-the-ink” approach may miss the point entirely. Wilhelm von Lenz notes that “This work, apparently so innocent and innocuous, poses particular problems of performance— as the composer himself frequently repeated.”39 Lenz outlines the way Chopin taught this piece, which emphasized the Nocturne’s formal structure (theme, three variations, closing cadenza), learning to play the left-hand part steadily before adding the right hand, and then describing a few ornaments including a version of the cadenza which “Chopin replaced … with a ravishing figuration which he copied into the scores of his favourite pupils.” One of these pupils was Jane Stirling, and comparing her score (with additions from Chopin) with Raoul Koczalski’s recording is illustrative.40 A standout feature of Koczalski’s recording is the embellishments. From the default modern view of the score, they are uncalled-for intrusions from the pianist. Yet if we attempt to understand this Nocturne after considering the historical record, this seemingly strictly defined score begins to be much more in sympathy with the idea that the score might be better viewed as a prompt to creativity—a verb, rather than a static noun. That Lenz describes the form first is telling and sets the frame for the possibility that this score is tightly related to improvisation and performative creation.41 The very idea that Chopin considered this piece a difficult one to perform is strange, and it is odder still that the first antidote prescribed for this difficulty was formal understanding.42 If we also consider that partimento-style practices were very much in force for Chopin and nineteenth-century keyboard culture,43 then the Nocturne begins to look less like a series of dots to be translated into

74  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess pitches and more like a kind of seriously over-notated, basic lead sheet—that is, a tune with a series of chord changes, repeated with embellishments. This has much in common with the Bach example cited earlier, and one imagines that Scheibe might offer similar criticisms of Chopin. Birnbaum’s repost, from this angle, provides an amusing and instructive juxtaposition with Applebaum’s call to “overcome conservatory training”: where the former considers that more notation is an aid to those who are “[in]sufficiently instructed,” the latter might consider someone with a literal understanding of this notation as educated past repair. In any case, the score looks quite different when understood as an excessively notated lead sheet. The misunderstanding is in mistaking the excess—which has the appearance of specificity and strict determination—for the meaning. If Sarasate’s bar 4 might be viewed as an overly prescriptive version of Applebaum’s upward diagonal, then perhaps this Nocturne is an over-elaboration of a score that mandates performerly participation in the form of (improvised) embellishments. Koczalski’s ornamentations might thus be seen as “historically informed” as well as “graphic-notationally informed.” Closer listening to the Koczalski recording raises the stakes still further. Rather than playing the last bar as written, Kocazlski embarks on an extended E♭-major arpeggio. This reading is repeated by Cortot, who suggested adding an extra bar and replacing the final chords with a rising arpeggio, an “evaporation de sonorités.”44 This is not simply embellishing a written-out variation because one is aware of historical practices related to improvisation. It rather seems to be a reflection of the view that what is notated in the last bar is not three E♭-major chords, but something more abstract—perhaps “ending.” Such a reading requires a willingness to release the assumption that what is played must accord with the strictly defined images learned in music classes and their accordant parameters (pitch, duration, intensity) and an attempt to access the idea described by the score. In this way, the score is not a literal dictation, but a graphic and metaphorical playground. Given Koczalski and Cortot’s backgrounds, one imagines that Chopin might be pleased to hear this different ending and might even echo Cage: “I don’t hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I have [not] yet heard.” Conclusion For Earle Brown, graphic notation was a means of reimagining a score as a catalyst for action—a verb—to inspire active interpretation on the part of the performer. Rather than being a vessel for the repetition of the static contents of a script, performers become agents in the act of imagining the music afresh with every performance. This understanding of performerly agency is very much at home in the world of historically informed performance. While this point may be readily understandable from the perspective of Western music before 1800, the notation of which is more or less “thin” and therefore subject to active interpretation, it may be equally true of music in the nineteenth century. Even as composers became increasingly specific in their notational choices, deploying markings such as hairpins and detailed ornamental filigree, they often used those aspects of notation to elicit a

Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation  75 strong—and individual—interpretive choice on the part of the performer. Viewing these pre-twentieth-century scores through the lens of graphic notation sheds new light on their meanings and implications for performance. Notes 1 Consider, for instance, the first edition of Chopin’s “Aeolian Harp” etude in A♭ Major, opus. 28, no 1, or the Sarabande from Ysaye’s fourth sonata for solo violin. 2 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 4. 3 Cage, “The Future of Music,” 5. Similarly, Cage’s Music for Piano (1952–1962) embraces the physical and material object of the score as its generative content. Many aspects of the performance are thus indeterminate. 4 Cage, “The Future of Music,” 4. 5 Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine,” in Silence, 15. On Cage’s “tentative” approach to graphic notation, see Natilee Harren, Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 30–70. 6 Cage, “Indeterminacy,” in Silence, 36. Morton Feldman also found the performerly liberty of graphic notation troublesome; his “graph music” attempted to notate duration with mechanical precision. See David Cline, “Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to Graph Music,” Twentieth-Century Music 10, no. 1 (2013): 59–90. 7 John Cage, Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969). 8 Theresa Sauer, “Foreword,” in Notations 21, ed. Theresa Sauer (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2009), 11. The quotation is from John Cage, Anarchic Harmony: Ein Buch der Frankfurt Feste‚ 92/Alte Oper Frankfurt. 9 Sauer, “Foreword,” 10. 10 Pauline Oliveros, “Foreword,” in Anthology of Text Scores, ed. Samuel Golter (Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2013), v. 11 Oliveros, “Foreword,” v. 12 Pauline Oliveros, “Introduction I” from Sonic Meditations (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1972), unpaginated. 13 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9–10. 14 Earle Brown, “On December 1952,” American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 3. 15 Jane Alden, “From Neume to Folio: Mediaeval Influences on Earle Brown’s Graphic Notation,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June/August 2007): 330. 16 On Augenmusik, see Alfred Einstein, “Augenmusik im Madrigal,” Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musik-Gesellschaft 14 (1912–1913): 8–21. 17 Barthold Kuijken, The Notation is Not the Music: Reflections on Early Music Practice and Performance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 2. 18 [Johann Adolph Scheibe], “Letter from an Able Musikant Abroad,” trans. in The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel, rev. and enlarged by Christoph Wolff (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 338. 19 Johann Abraham Birnbaum, “Impartial Comments on a Questionable Passage in the Sixth Number of Der Critische Musicus,” trans. in The New Bach Reader, 346–347. 20 François Couperin, L’art de toucher le clavecin/The Art of Playing the Harpsichord, trans. and ed. Margery Halford (Port Washington, NY: Alfred Publishing, 1974), 39. 21 Giulio Caccini, preface to Le nuove musiche (Florence: Marescotti, 1602), translated in Giulia Nuti, The Performance of Italian Basso Continuo: Style in Keyboard Accompaniment in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 14. 22 Francesco Geminiani, A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (London: s.n., 1749), 3.

76  David Hyun-su Kim, Elly Toyoda, and Rebecca Cypess 23 The recording can be heard at “Sarasate Plays Sarasate Zigeunerweisen,” https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=ABm7nMVyNh4 (accessed February 2, 2022). 24 See Robert D. Levin, “The Devil’s in the Details: Neglected Aspects of Mozart’s Piano Concertos,” in Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Text, Context, Interpretation, ed. Neal Zaslaw (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29–50. 25 Mark Applebaum, Handbook for The Metaphysics of Notation, https://web​.stanford​.edu/​ ~applemk​/other​-materials​/Han​dboo​kFor​TheM​etap​hysi​csOf​Nota​tion​Orig​inalDraft​.pdf (accessed January 2, 2022), 6. This work will be discussed further below. 26 David Hyun-su Kim, “The Brahmsian Hairpin,” 19th-Century Music 36, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 46–57. 27 Additional evidence for flexibility in approach to tempo and other parameters in the music of Brahms is in Clive Brown, Neal Peres da Costa, and Kate Bennett Wadsworth, Performing Practices in Johannes Brahms’ Chamber Music (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2015). 28 The score is available as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Prelude in G♭, op. 23, no. 10, https:// davidkimpiano​.com​/research​/Rac​hman​inof​fPre​lude​inGbmajor​.pdf (accessed November 20, 2022). Rachmaninoff’s audio recording is Example 27 at https://davidkimpiano​.com​ /research/ (accessed November 20, 2022). 29 The score is available as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Tableau in A minor, op. 39, no. 6. https:// davidkimpiano​.com​/research​/Rac​hman​inof​fEtu​deTa​blea​uinAminor​.pdf (accessed Nov­ ember 20, 2022). 30 Rachmaninoff’s audio recording is Example 28 at https://davidkimpiano​.com​/research/ (accessed November 20, 2022). 31 A 16-minute scrolling score can be viewed at Mark Applebaum, The Metaphysics of Notation, https://vimeo​.com​/127209761; an 8-minute version is at https://vimeo​.com​ /127214855 (accessed January 2, 2022). 32 Mark Applebaum, Handbook for The Metaphysics of Notation (2008), https://web​ .stanford​.edu/​~applemk​/other​-materials​/Han​dboo​kFor​TheM​etap​hysi​csOf​Nota​tion​Orig​ inalDraft​.pdf (accessed January 2, 2022), 6–7. 33 Applebaum, Handbook, 4. 34 Applebaum, Handbook, 4. 35 Applebaum, Handbook, 4. 36 Applebaum, Handbook, 3. 37 Mark Applebaum, Control Freak (2015), http://web​.stanford​.edu/​~applemk​/portfolio​ -works​-control​-freak​.html (accessed February 6, 2022). 38 In particular, Cathy Berberian, Stripsody, with its portmanteau title and vividly playful comic-strip score. See the recording with score excerpts at https://www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=5NeyfrfB6TU (accessed November 20, 2022). 39 Cited in Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 77–78. 40 Koczalski was a student of Carl Mikuli, one of Chopin’s most devoted acolytes. Koczalski’s recording of the Nocturne in E♭, op. 9, no. 2 is at https://www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=VRmek8kADWA (accessed February 6, 2022). 41 Interestingly, Lenz’s description notes that each variation consists of a variation, ritornello, and transition; this corresponds roughly to a chorus/verse, bridge, and turnaround (depending on how one uses the terminology). 42 Imagine, for instance, a piano lesson in which a student’s concerns about a piece’s difficulty were answered with a formal analysis. 43 Felix Diergarten, “Romantic Thoroughbass: Music Theory between Improvisation, Composition and Performance,” Theoria: Historical Aspects of Music Theory 18 (2011): 5–36. 44 Frédéric Chopin, Édition de travail des oeuvres de Chopin: Nocturnes, ed. Alfred Cortot (Paris: Éditions Salabert, 1945), 1:12.

Part II

Old Instruments for New Music



5

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices Vibrato, Historically Informed Performance, and New Music Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice

Among historians and performers of contemporary and historical Western art musics, few topics generate as much debate as the presence, parameters, and deployment of vocal vibrato. Treatises and pedagogical guides for singers since at least the sixteenth century have discussed vibrato in various contexts as a desired component of expressive singing in the Western classical tradition. Vibrato, succinctly defined as an enrichment of the vocal tone through periodic oscillations of pitch or amplitude, is a through line in both instrumental and vocal pedagogical writing beginning around 1600. Early treatises, concerned primarily with style, gave way to physiologically based instruction manuals in the wake of influential publications by Manuel Garcia II, Francesco Lamperti, and his son Giovanni Battista Lamperti in the early nineteenth century, and the production, use, and parameters of vocal vibrato remain a point of regular debate.1 Today, there exists a well-established if largely undocumented connection between the vocal technique used in the performance of early music (here broadly referring to compositions and musical practice in the Western tradition before 1800) and that created by living composers of art music today. The connection is anecdotally linked to increased concern with harmonic clarity, engagement with recording technology as a medium of dissemination, and other aesthetic values that challenge the status quo of what is often termed the standard or “common practice period” repertoire. In many cases, practitioners of both repertoires today use vocal vibrato that is less pronounced and audible in the overall musical fabric. In truth, the similar attitudes toward vibrato among these two groups (whose constituencies often overlap) are better understood as a byproduct of a much more complex web of artistic goals rather than an aesthetic end in itself. The primary source material that informed the historically informed performance (HIP) movement since its beginning in the second half of the twentieth century does not explicitly forbid audible vibrato or flexible use of different parameters of vibrato, as we will show, but implies a stylistic aesthetic that does differ from the dominant strain of contemporary vocal pedagogy, which is focused primarily on common-practice period repertoire, especially opera. As both early music performance and contemporary music sit generally outside the canonized repertoire of Western music and embody both counter-cultural and anti-canonistic values, there are many points of similarity, including an approach to vocal vibrato. DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-8

80  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice The term “vibrato,” however, is both so generalized in terms of meaning and so politicized because of its centrality to standard repertoire and vocal technique that further investigation is necessary to contextualize the term’s use in scholarship, pedagogy, and practice, as well as to understand the many types of vibratos employed in the performance of early and contemporary repertoires. In this chapter, we develop a nuanced definition of vibrato as both a physiological phenomenon and a constructed vocal practice. Next, we examine the aesthetic motivations of the HIP movement from its early iterations in the 1960s through its heyday in the 1970s–1980s, and today. In reviewing some of the major primary sources discussing vibrato’s role in singing, we identify correlations to aesthetic concerns of practitioners engaged in HIP with those of some contemporary composers and performers that extend far beyond the use (or lack of use) of pitch vibrato. This chapter explores the connections between early and contemporary vocal repertoire and sheds further light on some of the historical reasons that vocal vibrato has become a lightning rod for larger questions of classical vocal practice. What Is Vibrato? The term “vibrato” is variously used to represent a physiological phenomenon (oscillations of pitch, volume, or timbre), a type of vocal ornament, a by-product of a particular kind of resonant singing, and a sign of expressive vocal performance. These uses and definitions are interrelated and often conflated, necessitating some clarification and specific definitions of the term. A generally accepted definition of perceived vibrato in vocal and instrumental music is a regular (periodic) fluctuation of pitch and intensity, as well as amplitude (volume), “of such extent and rate as to give a pleasing flexibility, tenderness, and richness to the tones.”2 There is also general consensus in the scientific community that voices naturally produce this fluctuation in singing to a certain degree, whether it is perceptible to the listener or not.3 There remains some mystery about why voices vibrate in this way, in a physiological sense. The rate (frequency of oscillation) of normal singing vibrato correlates to the rates of pathological vocal tremors, indicating that the rate itself derives from a natural central nervous system process.4 LaPine identifies three objective traits of naturally produced vibrato—frequency, intensity, and amplitude—and three subjective ones, which can be manually manipulated—pitch, loudness, and quality.5 Some experiments have supported this notion that vibrato occurs in the domains of both amplitude and frequency, while others note that even though amplitude modulates along with the frequency in vibrato, this is not an independent quality of vibrato, but rather a representation of the interaction of frequency modulations with vocal tract resonances.6 Thus, while it is possible to measure the rate of a typical natural vocal vibration, most other qualities of vibrato lack clear, measurable parameters. Two studies examined by Dromey et al. demonstrate that the external stimulation of the cricothyroid (CT) and thyroarytenoid (TA) muscles can nearly replicate the natural vibrato rate and that most trained singers can adjust vibrato to match a control, suggesting that vibrato is not necessarily hardwired neurologically; like our respiratory mechanism,

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  81 some aspect is involuntary, but it likewise can be controlled and modified.7 The type of oscillation produced and the degree to which it is perceived by human ears depends far more on an individual singer’s instrument, training, and environment. Singers can produce perceptible vocal vibrato in several ways. It can be manipulated by respiratory action, which produces amplitude modulations; the effect of such manipulation is sometimes described as a variation in vocal timbre.8 Vibrato can also be a by-product of a particular kind of resonant singing typical of modern classical or conservatory training for opera. Voices trained to achieve natural projection and increased resonance often display a wider or more perceptible vocal vibrato in terms of both pitch and amplitude than singers trained for other styles. Some studies have implied that these vibratory movements result from modern classical singing as a way of preventing laryngeal fatigue.9 Others have posited that this kind of vibrato can also enhance vowel intelligibility.10 Performance practice scholar John Potter has dubbed the constant, perceptible vibrato that results from this training “modern classical vibrato.”11 The main mechanism of modern classical vibrato is the skilled modulation of harmonics and formants to maximize volume and resonance.12 This allows singers to be heard over an orchestra without amplification and without increasing subglottal pressure, which could result in fatigue or injury. The precise mechanisms for adjusting the vocal tract differ from person to person but are generally achieved by widening the pharynx, lowering the larynx, and releasing the jaw to a certain degree to boost the resonance and perceived amplitude of the fundamental pitch.13 The training that leads to these practices has been among the most common approaches to vocal pedagogy in Western classical traditions since the first half of the nineteenth century. Beyond physiological considerations, vocal vibrato has also been used and manipulated consciously for stylistic purposes. From the earliest treatises on vocal performance in Europe, vibrato was identified primarily as a communicative and emotive technique—in other words, as an ornament. Summarizing this perception of vibrato as a performance practice in the Baroque era, Frederick Neumann describes it as an action that can “enrich musical tone by rapid, regular oscillations of pitch, loudness, or timbre, or by a combination of these.”14 Similarly, Greta Moens-Haenen describes vibrato in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a type of ornament, narrower than a half-step in pitch variance.15 The use of vibrato as an ornament is also very closely tied to the use of portamento in early vocal treatises, another expressive ornament widely used through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.16 Lack of specificity around these uses and methods of producing vibrato, combined with frequent conflation of terminology, has yielded controversy in pedagogical and historical performance circles. For example, in some treatises until around 1900, the terms “vibrato” and “tremolo” were used interchangeably to describe the same phenomenon, whereas others use “tremolo” to describe an undesirable trembling or physiological ailment.17 Early twentieth-century experiments often conflated vibrato with timbre or vocal color, a practice that raises a whole set of complications in terms of meaning.18

82  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice A core conflict of these debates is not merely in naming conventions, but in the degree to which vibrato is inherent and natural in the voice and, secondarily, normative and acceptable in the performance of certain repertoire. While the broad desire for stylistic vibrato (and indeed, highly reverberant sounds and spaces in general) declined from the beginning of the twentieth century in many academic and art-music circles, the conflict came to a head in the early phase of the HIP movement. The use of modern vibrato became inextricably linked with the performance of common practice repertoire—in other words, with the Western musical canon. As the repertories of HIP performers and contemporary art music singers both sit outside of this canon for the most part, it is useful to examine the ways in which the aesthetic motivations of both groups are linked in ways beyond vibrato yet result in similar attitudes towards vocal production. Primary Sources: Stylistic and Natural Vibrato Several treatises from before 1800 discuss vocal vibrato as distinct from instrumental vibrato; treatises describing instrumental performance are more apt to mention vibrato than their vocal counterparts, and their authors tend to refer to the practice much more specifically as an ornament to achieve a certain effect rather than a desirable quality in the overall sound. By contrast, nearly every cited treatise on vocal vibrato indicates that its use is a quality of good singing but also includes a qualification about the degree to which it should be used, often referring to other ornaments in the same connection. Overall, these excerpts suggest that the type of vibrating described is that which is a natural by-product of singing, whether perceptible or not, and that any large oscillation of pitch and/or volume is to be avoided. While the sources on vibrato in early music have been examined in the past by scholars such as Frederick Neumann, their interpretation remains subject to debate. Neumann used several of these sources to reach the conclusion that audible pitch vibrato is artistically and historically appropriate in pre-1800 repertoire. A handful of excerpts from these treatises show that indeed, they do not advise against vocal vibrato; the vocal technique employed by those who adhere to this guidance in early music performance does differ, however, from modern classical vibrato and is often less perceptible in some parameters, especially pitch. A brief examination of a few of these sources makes clear that all performers of historical repertoire need to reckon with the varying recommendations from treatise writers. In general, the guidance is quite flexible, implying the presence of an unobtrusive vibration that is both natural and aesthetically desirable. Lodovico Zacconi, for example, associates the use of vibrato with skill in ornamentation, relating it to vocal freedom: Its nature is such that using it (the tremolo), one should always use it, so that use converts into habit, because this continuous moving of the voice helps, and voluntarily pushes the movement of the gorgie, and marvelously facilitates the beginning of passaggi; This movement of which I speak should not occur if not with appropriate quickness, energy and vehemence.19

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  83 Knowledge and taste are often invoked as arbiters of the correct use of all types of ornamentation, including vibrato. Occasionally, dissonance treatment or the need for harmonic clarity is invoked as a reason to limit vocal vibrato, and we cite such passages in order to make such connections clear. Georg Quintschreiber’s 1598 De canendi elegantia is a particularly striking example: What must be ensured is limited to this: that the eyes and the mind are to be brought to bear on two sounds, MI and FA, as the goal of the matter, so that one thing will not be indiscriminately encroached upon by another: for these two sounds, which are the seasoning of all music and the particular cause of concord, the ancients have said, on which all music depends. It [music] is sung best with a quivering voice. One should not become accustomed to singing too zealously, but as much as one can limit the voice through study and diligence, and it is to be moderated in this way so that a certain clarity through sweet sound, like sweetly singing girls, may be produced.20 Quitschreiber’s emphasis on the two solmization syllables that articulate the halfstep in conjunction with harmony in general is essential context for his oft-quoted short phrase recommending vocal vibrato. However, like Zacconi, he immediately follows it with an injunction not to go too far. Johann Mattheson distinguishes between trillo and tremolo (vibrato). He makes it clear that both are ornaments, implying that vibrato is not always present. Tremolo, according to Mattheson, is “the slightest possible oscillation on a fixed tone,” which certainly accords with the long German tradition of trying to limit vibrato by invoking sound musical judgment. His appears to be one of the first treatises to offer a physical explanation of performing vocal vibrato. One must not in the least confuse the tremolo with the trillo and trilletto: as almost all ancient writers have done: for the last-named ornaments consist in a sharp and clear striking of two adjacent or neighboring pitches, alternating one with the other as fast as possible; and also the trillo is not distinguished from the trilletto except as regards its duration, which for the last is only very short.21 Neumann claims that Johann Mattheson was one of many “deceived … into believing that a good vocal vibrato consisted only of intensity fluctuations on the same pitch.”22 He invokes Mozart in his argument that vibration (specifically pitch vibration) is a natural component of the voice. The human voice vibrates by itself, but in a way and to a degree that is beautiful—this is the nature of the voice, and one imitates it not only on wind instruments, but also on strings, and even on the clavichord but as soon as one carries it too far, it ceases to be beautiful, because it is unnatural.23

84  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice The nuance that these sources provide, and the debate that they have generated among modern scholars, speak to the various ways that vibrato has been addressed as both a stylistic tool and a physiological reality of human voices, even in pre1800 treatises. Thus, modern classical vibrato is not the first pedagogical technique concerned with healthy or natural vocal production. Even without the tools of direct observation, such as the laryngoscope, treatise writers spoke of vocal freedom and advocated for an open vocal tract. These sources simultaneously acknowledge that voices vibrate and that audible pitch vibrato was a stylistic tool for singers to employ in pursuit of musical expression rather than a constant, default state of the voice. Aesthetic Motivations of HIP A general turn away from prominent and consistent vibrato as a regular feature of classical vocal performance became entwined in the aesthetic values of the HIP movement, which gained popularity in 1960s and 1970s, in the same historical moment when many contemporary composers were turning to increasingly experimental, avant-garde techniques.24 HIP and new music grew to share a set of aesthetic motivations, which led to the adoption of similar practices, including a rejection of the consistent use of vibrato in vocal music. The aesthetics of historically informed performance practice can be productively described in relation to the creation of the musical canon, the formation of which began in the eighteenth century and developed further in the nineteenth century. For Bruce Haynes, the emergence of the canon coincided with the rise of what he terms “canonism,” an ideology of classically oriented performers. Among the basic assumptions of canonism are that certain composers are geniuses to be revered; that their musical works are held in an “almost scriptural awe”; and that the musical score is a text that must be interpreted literally, whether the composer’s conventions of notation represent their intentions for performance or (just as often) not.25 Paradoxically, practitioners of HIP stand within and also somewhat apart from this ideology. The rise of the discipline of musicology within the academy in the early twentieth century led to a scientific, positivist approach to the study of repertory, including, for the first time, the systematic study of pre-Enlightenment music. This contributed enormously to the aesthetic (and, initially, the polemics) of HIP, and it is important to note that, within the academy, one could experience concurrently the cultivation of new music by members of a composition faculty alongside the study and performance of old music by musicologists and performers. As we discuss below, there are shared aesthetic considerations for both new and old music that were undoubtedly influenced by the confluence of the two repertories within the academy during the twentieth century. The early music revival initially had a kinship with the arts and crafts movement, which was current just as musicology began its rise within the academy during the first half of the twentieth century. As Thomas Forrest Kelly has noted, by the 1960s the movement had taken on “political overtones … fueled by a sense of

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  85 return to the natural, a rebellion against received wisdom and enforced conformity, and” (due to the activities of a substantial number of amateur musicians) “a notion that early music was as much a participant’s music as it was a listener’s.”26 At its most extreme, this scrutiny led to what might be termed anti-canonism, an all-out rejection of classical music as too “establishment” in favor of countercultural currents that became increasingly mainstream during the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, it is essential to note that many practitioners of HIP often pursue two overlapping goals: the rediscovery of unknown or under-appreciated repertories, sometimes by composers who were neglected because of their religion, gender, or race; and an effort to recover lost performing styles, believing that the music will find new adherents if the performing style is not inherited wholesale via a pedagogical tradition that owes as much to the recent past as it does to the music’s own time. The former effort—which often involves the discovery of a musical culture at considerable remove from the canon (not to mention the present)—is explicitly anti-canonist and resonates with the concomitant desire to include vernacular and non-Western musics in the curriculum of music in higher education; the latter effort can be construed as an effort to reconceive works within the canon both in terms those who produced them might understand and in ways that reinvigorate their meaning and value for current audiences. Once the HIP movement gained substantial momentum beginning in the 1970s, enthusiasm about it—particularly the new approaches to well-known repertoire— led to sanctimonious statements by adherents, who often vigorously asserted the “authenticity” of the instruments and the practices they used, which in turn resulted in acrimonious debate with doubters, who called into question the nature of the available evidence and the coincidence of the aesthetic considerations for the performance of old and new music—a topic to which we shall return.27 The aesthetic motivations of HIP have evolved somewhat to avoid the absolutism concerning “authenticity” and “composer intentions,” which are chimerical notions where composers from the distant past are concerned. Nevertheless, the principles retain a substantial break with the received tradition of the late nineteenth century and, while not universally applicable, can be articulated as follows: Programming of non-canonic works. Works that have not traditionally been recognized as part of the canon have as much validity as canonic works and are performed with the same degree of reverence (which might or might not conform to that of canonistic concert-hall ritual). 2. Performing style and aesthetic approach derived from scholarship as much as received tradition. Performance practices (broadly construed as the instruments used, the number of performers, the techniques employed, the context created by surrounding works on the program, and even the architectural and acoustical space in which the performance takes place) are influenced substantially—perhaps even principally—by what scholarship reveals about them rather than only by the received tradition of the conservatory. Often the collective, collaborative impulse of HIP reflects both the performance practices recorded by treatises designed for practicing musicians and the aesthetic 1.

86  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice aims imparted by theorists offering directions to composers. For example, dissonance treatment is emphasized by theorists of the Renaissance period to such a degree that the performance style is typically one that allows those dissonances and their resolutions to be heard clearly. (A large fluctuation in pitch, such as that of significant vocal vibrato, tends to obscure such dissonances and resolutions.) 3. Redefinition of relationship between audience and compositional milieu. The purpose in abiding by such principles, which may be implicit or explicit, is often to redefine the connection between audience and compositional milieu (not just the composer) via performers who are self-consciously aware of both. Such redefinition can create performances that sound different from the typical canonistic performances of the recent past. (It should be acknowledged, however, that as HIP performances of canonic works, such as those by Bach and Handel, become more accepted, this distinction is softening. The same can be said for performances of early Baroque and Renaissance music, whose practices are slowly becoming accepted by mainstream classical audiences.) 4. Humanize rather than deify composers (and performers). The anti-canonist impulse of HIP often results in a desire to humanize rather than deify composers, together with a concomitant decentering (yet also, paradoxically, empowering) of individual performers. Because musical texts from the past and scholarly editions made from them are often less prescriptive than later editions influenced by the conservatory tradition, performers are empowered with somewhat more input on interpreting a work (albeit through an HIP lens) than their non-HIP colleagues. As noted above, elements of these aesthetic approaches place HIP firmly within the canonist tradition (as, for example, when practitioners perform the music of a canonic composer), even if other elements, such as the use of unconventional or little-known performance practices, place them somewhat apart from it. Repertoire alone does not suffice to make musicians practitioners of HIP. While two celebrated nineteenth-century revivals of early repertory—Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s choral music in the early part of the century and the Cecilian movement in the later part—are both examples of revivals of old repertory, neither had at their core the aesthetics of HIP, which emerged in the twentieth century as a result of very specific aesthetic and cultural circumstances. Finally, while the political and counter-cultural elements of HIP may be less apparent than they once were, they are still present. Many practitioners began their careers in the traditional way in classical, canonist contexts, but a substantial number began with an interest in music firmly outside of canonist norms. This has been particularly true for players of certain instruments of a certain age (several prominent lutenists began their musical careers playing electric guitar in rock bands in the 1970s), but one can find examples among all practitioners. While the notion of a “return to the natural” that became part of the movement in the 1960s has faded somewhat, the idea that HIP exists outside of the strict “received” tradition of canonist performance remains.

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  87 Correlations with Contemporary Composers and Performers The general acknowledgment of the connections of aesthetic goals of HIP described above and new music is largely anecdotal; “new music” itself encompasses such a wide variety of styles and compositional approaches that identifying any truly universal traits would be disingenuous. It is possible, however, to glean some idea of prevailing trends based on examples of composers and ensembles who regularly engage with the questions of how their work might be in dialogue with, or in response to, earlier repertories of vocal music. “New music” is a decidedly broad and vague term for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century compositions with roots in the so-called “uptown” experimental scene. Both in academic circles and in circles of professional singers, the overlap between personnel who sing early liturgical music and new music signals an obvious connection. Such connections, however, go deeper than ensemble rosters, and they are perhaps best explored through brief case studies. In the wake of the post-World War II turn towards the avant garde and total serialism in the academy, composers demanded different approaches to vocal style. Milton Babbitt’s engagement with electronic tape, for example, made exacting demands on a singer. His Philomel from 1964, a work of total serialism, was written for soprano Bethany Beardslee and set the singer against her own recorded echo. Beardslee’s vocal style reflected the needs of Babbitt’s disjunct, wide-ranging vocal line in its light and flexible approach. The audible pitch vibrato is minimal, but the voice does vibrate and never stagnates. The piece demands a significant vocal agility, as it features abrupt dynamic shifts, alternating rapid, staccato text with long, sustained passages, and Sprechstimme. The live singer’s part is constantly intertwining and hocketing with the recorded voice as Philomel gradually regains her full voice, finally synchronizing at the end of part one (see Example 5.1). Beardslee’s approach helped to realize Babbitt’s desire to combine the eerie, artificial sounds of electronic tape with a very human, organic vocal production, eventually merging the two. Constant pitch vibrato, with its expressive capabilities and reverberant qualities, is essentially incompatible with the precision and pitch specificity necessary to perform this piece. The distortions that the tape produces, similarly, are sounds beyond the scope of what a natural human voice even could produce; the tape is distorted, but the live voice does use an open, vibrating vocal tract with amplitude variation, though the pitch remains precise enough to align with the recording. Beardslee’s (live) voice certainly vibrates, although any change in the pitch amplitude is negligible; a nuanced understanding of the vocal production of a singer such as Beardslee can demonstrate that she did not sing with exclusively “straight” tone, nor is that what the composition necessarily requires.28 Philomel is indicative of a broader aesthetic modernist movement in the 1950s–1970s by academic composers like Babbitt, Stockhausen, Boulez, and Ginastera, among others. Intensified by the incorporation of recording technology, these composers’ interest lay in representation of the counterpoint and precision of dissonance of the work as accurately and transparently as possible.

88  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice

Example 5.1  Philomel, bars 119–127. Words by John Hollander. Music by Milton Babbitt. Copyright © 1964 by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  89 At this same historical moment, when the creative capacities of recording technology for the act of composition were being explored in new ways, improved recording technology for commercial markets was helping to make the HIP movement an economic success. Record sales for home consumption created a new venue for early music performances, and these changing listening practices were informing a changing approach; the perception of a voice on a record is a distinctly different experience from the embodied vocal production one perceives during a live performance.29 A recording studio is often a less reverberant space, and the acoustic realities often necessitated the use of a vocal style more akin to the precise clarity of Beardslee. In this manner, the same tools were crafting similar results through vastly different means. Certainly, art music composition in the last 50 years extends far beyond Babbitt and the “who cares if you listen?” camp; even the most avant-garde performers explored an increasingly wide range of styles. For example, in the present volume, Kailan Rubinoff explores how celebrated contemporary singer Cathy Berberian shifted to become one of the premiere interpreters of Monteverdi in the 1960s and 1970s. Berberian’s flexible approach provided a model for the contemporary singers and composer-performers of the next several decades. Restricted vibrato for the purposes of harmonic clarity is by no means a requirement or, in some cases, a concern at all in contemporary art music repertoire. Additionally, recording technology, whether used as live electronic production or studio recording, has improved to manipulate reverberation or any other acoustical parameters easily once deemed fixed by a given space. Yet even those composers whose work shares little with the modernists in terms of harmonic or formal approach often still demonstrate aesthetic connections with early music performance, both in solo and ensemble works. Pamela Z (b. 1956), a composer-performer best known for her work for voice and live electronics, presents an interesting case study in the examination of the connection between early and new music vocal performance. Like her fixedtape predecessors, Z explores the ways that electronics can enhance, distort, and change the expressive capacities of music and the voice, and she has engaged with a variety of electronic tools since she first became active as a performer in the 1980s. Trained in classical voice, Z’s technique differs drastically from singers like Bethany Beardslee, who, in addition to premiering Babbit’s Philomel, collaborated with other modernist composers like Babbitt, Boulez, and Peter Maxwell Davies. While Z also explores a number of extended techniques, she often employs what can best be described as a modern classical voice, with constant vibrato, often detected in both pitch and amplitude. Both singers are decidedly “new music” voices, engaging with electronics, and, though they differ in their approach to vocal production, both still maintain much more in common with their early music predecessors than common practice-era singers. Z’s tactile engagement with electronics such as digital delay hardware, the BodySynth, gesture-controlled MIDI instruments, and other software tools has shaped her compositional approach and informed her musical style. One of her early pieces, Badagada, like Philomel, is concerned with the interaction of live and recorded versions of Z’s voice. Performed live with a digital delay box, Badagada

90  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice layers vocal utterances that are first sung live and then looped to create an accompaniment over which Z sings. Where Babbitt’s Philomel is scored with a fixed tape, Badagada utilizes a dynamic layering of sound, which passes from a live to recorded state in real time. Both pieces address the idea of organic growth: Z layers one iteration of text on top of another until the utterances have grown into one intertwined, resonant accompaniment, while Babbitt gradually interpolates a fixed recording with a live voice until they become one. There is a clear connection between Z’s exploration of live electronics as a relatively new tool in the 1980s to a similar impulse in technological development in musical instruments in the early modern period. Z’s engagement with digital delay resonates with the identification by Rebecca Cypess and Steven Kemper in both early modern and contemporary music-technological aesthetics concerning theories of “instruments of all sorts as vehicles of discovery and the creation of knowledge.”30 They link the engagement with technology in contemporary electronic music to the similar explosion of new repertoire for acoustic instrument technology at the turn of the seventeenth century; in this way, they provide a means of understanding Z’s place in a clear lineage of composer-musicians whose exploration of musical instruments shapes their creative process. It also contributes to the HIP aesthetic of humanizing rather than deifying the composer, since she is almost always performing her own work, and much of her solo output is embodied by default. Finally, it is worth noting that Z uses electronics in a way that enhances and supports her own vocal technique rather than altering it. The resonant use of modern vibrato, which pervades much of her vocal production, is amplified rather than distorted by her tools of choice. In the most recent generation of composer/performers, new approaches to composition continue to reflect the strong connection between early vocal style and experimental techniques. One composer with a fundamentally different approach circulating in today’s new music scene is Caroline Shaw (b. 1982); despite her penchant for embracing the stylistic and harmonic language of popular music and its corresponding vocal techniques, her work also demonstrates a deep connection with the aesthetics of Baroque style, including her tendency to perform her own work. This connection manifests in formal structures, collaborative compositional models, flexibility in notation, and the availability of space for improvisation within her compositions.31 As a result, the approach to Shaw’s vocal music by her most frequent interpreters bears out many of the connections with historical performances of eighteenth-century repertoire. Shaw engages in forms of composition that are often not based on the fixity of a musical text, but that require interpretation and collaboration of the musicians playing the piece. Her chamber work This Might Also Be a Form of Dreaming, for example, includes a movement that lays out instructions and guidelines for a homophonic musical recitation of Claudia Rankine’s text, constrained to a single mode, built around the central pitches C and G, but without notation on staves or rhythmic specifications. Singers are instructed to change pitch at certain times within the text, but those pitches are not dictated or notated. Without pre-arranging pitch choices, “there is no way to predict which chord will be the most dissonant,

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  91 which will contain the highest or lowest pitches, which will be the most resonant given the arrangement of pitches, or, if, by some chance, the singers all choose the same pitch.”32 Aspects of this piece echo some of the indeterminacy of Cage and other experimentalists, but also require performers to make stylistically appropriate musical choices in collaboration with others; this approach is decidedly antimodernist and also aligns well with some of the performance practice tenets of HIP. Additionally, it is a musical product that is concerned with text and harmonic resonance more than complexity, dissonance, or reducible formal structures. In terms of vocal production, Shaw’s performances are notable because she does not engage with modern classical vocal technique as much as many of her colleagues. She is primarily a violinist and has studied a variety of vocal performance techniques as part of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, as Sarah Darling and Estelí Gomez discuss in detail elsewhere in this volume. Without engaging in the standard modern classical vocal tradition, she has developed a technique that is much more akin to pre-nineteenth-century classical voice, an approach with resonator placement similar to speech.33 It is challenging to identify a single, dominant approach to vocal performance in any era, although each of these three examples demonstrates some ways that new music connects directly to the aesthetic concerns of HIP today. Furthermore, John Butt notes that even in common practice period repertoire, “Enough recorded evidence survives to suggest that the ‘mainstream’ was quite variable before massmarketing of records encouraged a certain degree of standardization.”34 Thus, we have evidence that many aspects of Romantic practice, including continuous vibrato, did not become uniform until well into the twentieth century. Ultimately, there is no single, genuine tradition of any repertoire that modern performers can claim to be the “correct” one, and even our mainstream conception of classical singing is not necessarily an accurate replication of what nineteenth-century pedagogies prescribe. Conclusion The problem of terminology surrounding various parameters and usages of vibrato requires more nuanced discourse as it applies to contemporary repertoire. Certainly, voices vibrate, but the scale, degree, and parameters of that vibration have often been conflated, and many pedagogues maintain the position that constant vibrato, a simplified term for a specific kind of constant pitch and amplitude vibrato, is the natural state of the healthy singing voice. That kind of vocal production is a result of training for a particular kind of singing, mainly operatic, to increase efficiency, resonance, and stamina. The assumption, however, is that this particular technique of modern classical singing is unmarked and therefore the default can be problematic. The binary opposition that is set up regarding the use of standard vocal vibrato in particular and repertoire of the common practice period in general is, in our view, part of a longstanding practice supporting the superiority of particular kinds of composition, the voices for which they were written, and ultimately, in bolstering a colonialist narrative of Western art music that is now under scrutiny.

92  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice Scholars like Nina Sun Eidsheim have been explicit in the ways that this sort of assumption, common among singers and pedagogues in Western tradition, manifests in regard to nonwhite voices; she argues that timbre, of which vibrato is an inextricable part, is always constructed rather than innate, noting that “The figure of sound is entrained into voices and is subsequently used to authenticate the very value system from which it was born.”35 Regarding the similarities between new music performance and historically informed performances of old music, the connection seems to lie in both the shared countercultural and anti-canonistic values, as well as in performance practices, rather than in an explicit rejection of constant vibrato as an aesthetic value. Indeed, we have shown that “vibrato” is too broad a concept to embrace or deny entirely, and a variety of vocal approaches live comfortably within both practices. But performers who specialize in HIP and new music, who anecdotally have an implicit understanding of the issue, clearly recognize that the manifestations of classical training in the conservatory tradition are cultural practices rather than natural physiological phenomena. The concept of constant, audible vocal vibrato is only “natural” insofar as it results involuntarily from the maximizing of breath support and resonance. This is a kind of singing that is necessary in large halls when a singer must contend with an orchestra, but it is not an unmarked feature of all voices, nor is it the only “healthy” approach to singing. In venues outside the major opera houses and concert halls, which include contemporary performances of both old and new music, singers who embrace the multifaceted capabilities of the human voice find that their work resonates with that of artists in other styles of music who also adapt their vocal style to the needs of the work, embodying a variety of vocal identities. In the process, they find that their work has an increased sense of value and even a broad sense of belonging. Notes 1 Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 338–365. See also Karen Sell, The Disciplines of Vocal Pedagogy: Towards an Holistic Approach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 27. 2 Carl E. Seashore, “Measurements on the Expression of Emotion in Music,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 9, no. 9 (September 15, 1923): 323–325. 3 Jody Kreiman and Diana Sidtis, Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception (Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2011). 4 Kreimin and Sidtis, Foundations, 395. 5 Peter R. LaPine, “The Relationship between the Physical Aspects of Voice Production and Optimal Vocal Health,” Music Educators Journal 94, no. 3 (January 2008): 24. 6 Yoshiyuki Horii and Kuniaki Hata, “A Note on Phase Relationships between Frequency and Amplitude Modulations in Vocal Vibrato,” Folia Phoniatrica 40 (1988): 303–311; Christopher Dromey, Lorie Reese, and J. Arden Hopkin, “Laryngeal-Level Amplitude Modulation in Vibrato,” Journal of Voice 23 (2009): 156–163. 7 Dromey, Reese, and Hopkin, “Laryngeal-Level Amplitude Modulation in Vibrato,” 159. 8 Kreiman and Sidtis, Foundations, 395.

Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices  93 9 John Large and Shigenobu Iwata, “Aerodynamic Study of Vibrato and Voluntary ‘Straight Tone’ Pairs in Singing,” Folia Phoniatrica 23 (1971): 50–65. Another useful study is John Nix, “New Voices in Research: Vibrato and Non-Vibrato Singing: Who Teaches It? How Do They Teach It? Does It Make a Difference?” The Choral Journal 53, no. 9 (April 2013): 57–66. 10 Meribeth Bunch, Dynamics of the Singing Voice (Vienna: Springer, 1997). 11 John Potter, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 Dromey, Reese, and Hopkin, “Laryngeal-Level Amplitude Modulation in Vibrato,” 168. 13 Kreiman and Sidtis, Foundations, 392. 14 Frederick Neumann, “The Vibrato Controversy,” Performance Practice Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 14–27. 15 Greta Moens-Haenen, Das Vibrato in der Musik des Barock (Graz: Akademische Drukund Verlagsanstalt, 1988), 92. Also see Frederick Kent Gable, “Some Observations Concerning Baroque and Modern Vibrato,” Performance Practice Review 5, no. 1 (1992): 90–102. 16 As an example, see Roger Freitas, “Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 2 (2018): 287– 369. 17 Tilo Hähnel and Karin Martensen, “How Thomas A. Edison Shaped Today’s Singing Ideal: Tracking His Ambiguous Concept of Tremolo by Analysing Archival Documents and Sound Recordings,” Empirical Musicology Review 14, nos. 1–2 (2019): 22–49. 18 Hähnel and Martensen, “How Thomas A. Edison Shaped Today’s Singing Ideal”; see also Eidsheim, “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre,” 45, and Grant Olwage, “The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre,” Ethnomusicology Forum 13, no. 2 (November 2004): 203–226. 19 Lodovico Zacconi, Prattica di musica (Venice: Bartolomeo Carampello, 1592), Book 1, Chapter 66, translated in Edward V. Foreman, ed. and trans., Late Renaissance Singing (Minneapolis: Pro Musica Press, 2001), 67. 20 Georg Quitschreiber, De canendi elegantia (Jena: Weidner, 1598), 2. “Videndum comprimis est, ut oculi atque mens ad duos sonos, MI & FA, tanquam ad scopum rei ferantur, ne alius pro alio promiscue usurpetur: Nam ab his duabus vocibus, quae sunt condimentum totius Musicae, & praecipua causa harmoniae, dixerunt veteres, tota pendet Musica. Tremula voce optime canitur. Non pleno ore canere assuescat, sed quanto potest fieri studio & diligentia vocem reprimat, atque ita moderetur, ut quiddam argutum dulci sono, tanquam puellae suaviter canentes, proferat.” 21 Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Herold, 1739), Part II, Chapter 3, paragraphs 27–30. Translated in Johann Mattheson, Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister: A Revised Translation with Critical Commentary, ed. and trans. Ernest C. Harriss (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 270–271. 22 Neumann, "The Vibrato Controversy,” 23 23 Neumann, “The Vibrato Controversy,” 26. 24 See Kailan Rubinoff’s contribution to the present volume. 25 Bruce Haynes, The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2007), 5–6. 26 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2. 27 Perhaps the most notable example is Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 28 A statement by Beardslee in the Boston Globe succinctly encapsulates her approach to new music: “The way to sing Webern is to sing the way you sing Mozart”; quoted in David H. Miller, “Singing Webern, Sounding Webern: Bethany Beardslee, Grace-Lynne

94  Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice Martin, and Marni Nixon, 1950–1957,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 75, no. 1 (2022): 81–127. 29 Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 30 ​Rebecca Cypess and Steven Kemper, “The Anthropomorphic Analogy: Humanising Musical Machines in the Early Modern and Contemporary Eras,” Organised Sound 23, no. 2 (August 2018): 172. 31 Rachael Lansang, “Songs for Contemporary Voices: Perspectives and Strategies of Women Making Music in the Twenty-First Century” (Ph.D. Diss., Rutgers University, 2019), 116–118. 32 Lansang, “Songs for Contemporary Voices.” 33 Eidsheim, “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre.” 34 John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34. 35 Eidsheim, “Race and the Aesthetics of Vocal Timbre,” 41.

6

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute Tradition as a Key to Innovation Matteo Gemolo

Following the neoclassical and modernist revaluation of long-forgotten instruments such as the harpsichord, the recorder, and the viola da gamba, the post avant-garde music scene has welcomed a further development of this phenomenon and opened its door to an increasing number of eighteenth-century orchestral instruments. In the late 1990s, the British orchestra Academy of Ancient Music (AAM), founded in 1973 by Christopher Hogwood, began to perform new music, following the lead of its newly appointed conductor Paul Goodwin. Since then, an increasing number of orchestras on period instruments have, like the AAM, begun promoting a bold and innovative programming policy, mixing early and contemporary music. These include the Belgian B’Rock Orchestra, the Finnish Baroque Orchestra, the Freiburger Barockorchester, and the Dunedin Consort.1 Leading virtuosos on period instruments such as Dan Laurin, Hans-Martin Linde, Stephen Preston, Mahan Esfahani, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola, and Elinor Frey have enlarged their traditional repertoire too, by embracing new styles and commissioning contemporary pieces. Amongst the variety of period instruments in use, the one-keyed flute, also known as traverso, has offered some distinctive sonic possibilities to contemporary composers thanks to its particular characteristics, radically different from its “modern” Boehm counterpart—and its ability to embrace a whole range of extended techniques. Over the last six years of professional activity as both performer and researcher, I have collected and cataloged more than 150 titles of new music written for the traverso. In this chapter I will present a few emblematic works from this repertoire with the aim of outlining its main trends and styles. The Debut of the Traverso in the Contemporary Music Scene I begin with Anspielungen,2 a solo piece for the one-keyed flute composed in 1988 by the German flautist and composer Hans-Martin Linde. The German root word anspielen embodies a double meaning, being translatable into English as both “try out” and “allude to.” While the first meaning refers to the piece’s considerable use of extended techniques, the second stands for the dense variety of quotations drawn from the traditional traverso literature that are reworked throughout its different movements. These include quotations not only from Johann Sebastian Bach—the Sonata in E minor, BWV 1034, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, BWV 1050, and the Partita for solo flute, BWV 1013—and Carl Philipp Emanuel, but also from DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-9

96  Matteo Gemolo

Figure 6.1  Hans-Martin Linde, Anspielungen, bars 3–7. Copyright © 1988 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. In bar 5, note Linde’s quotation from the incipit of J. S. Bach’s Flute Sonata in E minor, BWV 1034, which resolves to C-E♭ chord, to be sung and played at the same time.

Mozart’s Concerto in G, K. 313. As bright falling stars, such tonal elements might deceive an audience trying to navigate the darkness of Linde’s atonal night but, in fact, they are just a temporary reminder of a utopian era of tunes and tonality which remains beyond reach. The presence of numerous extended techniques has the effect of modifying and transforming the nature of each musical phrase. Most of these extended techniques are borrowed from the modern flute repertoire: singing while playing (see Figure 6.1), flutter tonguing, glissandos, and slap tonguing. Others are the result of Linde’s long experience as a recorder and traverso player and involve different types of vibrato (namely hard-tonguing vibrato, diaphragm vibrato, and lip vibrato) and finger vibrato or flattement, in line with the French Baroque flute tradition.3 Through these fragments from the Baroque and Classical flute repertoire, the final work could easily be characterized as an avant-gardist collage of new and reworked material, a patchwork of traditional idioms broadly covered by thick layers of dripping atonal paint and hardened brushes of extended techniques and special effects. But, as foreseen by the title, the ambiguity harbored in Anspielungen would become a hallmark of the forthcoming postmodernist phase.​ Time for Irony: The Case of Jukka Tiensuu The Italian novelist and literary critic Umberto Eco expounded a fascinating metaphor to elucidate one key aspect of postmodernism: I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute  97 words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.” At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony … But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.4 Although paradoxical, Eco’s metaphor reinforces the idea of postmodernism as a condition which welcomes the expression of feelings only at the cost of channeling them through a refined system of citations. How does one enter “the twinkling kitsch realm of the late Dame Barbara Cartland”5 without succumbing to rhodophobia? Eco’s answer is simple: by relinquishing innocence and, instead, relying on irony. The output of the Finnish composer Jukka Tiensuu invites us to do the same: the stratification of different encoded “affects” and references to past idioms that operate in his music needs to be analyzed with a certain level of ironic detachment. One of Tiensuu’s typical diverse interests (from early music to computer software) is reflected in the diversity of his compositional style. In a book chapter on “New Music of Finland,”6 Kimmo Korhonen briefly summed up the variety of strategies in Tiensuu’s music from the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, from his first use of live electronics and spectral analysis to his latest so-called “neo-neoclassical” works.7 Tiensuu has devoted much attention to early instruments, from an early modernist-style Ouverture for flute and harpsichord (1972), in which he explores microtones and spectral harmonies in the manner of Paavo Heininen, to his latest orchestral works including Innuo (2017) for Baroque orchestra and Appo (2017) for recorder and orchestra. Completed in 1998, Musica ambigua, jointly commissioned by the Warsaw Autumn Festival and Finnish viola da gamba player and cellist Markku Luolajan-Mikkola, is scored entirely for period instruments (recorder or traverso, Baroque violin, viola da gamba or Baroque cello, and harpsichord). It represents a clear breakthrough in Tiensuu’s style, since previously he had always used the harpsichord alongside “modern,” twentieth-century instruments and in a manner perfectly keeping with the modernist tradition. In Musica ambigua, Baroque taste and invention still interact with a contemporary musical language, but the new trend is in no way reminiscent of conservative or antimodernist approaches, nor does it contain any trace of “nostalgia for the good old days of tunes and tonality.”8 Tiensuu’s bold use of traditional ornaments, expressive markings, and tonal motifs enables him to achieve a traditional sense of lyricism and drama without relinquishing the full inventory of “effects” such as quarter-tones, multiphonics, percussive effects, and glissandos. The work is shaped as a suite and divided into six sections, which can be performed together

98  Matteo Gemolo or separately. Telemann’s Nouveaux quatuors en six suites seem to have provided a model for Tiensuu in the following respects:

• The use of a specific set of instruments (the so-called “Paris Quartet,” consisting • • • •

of the traverso, the Baroque violin, the viola da gamba, and the harpsichord). The subdivision of each suite into six parts. The use of an introductory prelude. References to specific emotional characters in the titles of each movement. The employment of a concertante style, in which four instrumental parts have equal importance.

Nevertheless, unlike Telemann’s quartets, Musica ambigua does not refer to dance types, nor does it use traditional da capo form or allude to either the rondeau (a recurrent element in every Telemann quartet) or any other directly French-inspired movement-type.9 The use of recorder in place of the traverso is necessitated by the tessitura, which sometimes goes beyond that of the traverso. In 2003, Tiensuu composed a new piece for the same ensemble of instruments entitled Tiet/Lots.10 Unlike Musica ambigua, in which the recorder was still preferred to the traverso, here both tessitura and dynamics seem to favor the use of the traverso. The four movements are called “ways” or “paths,” some of them explicitly inspired by Baroque genres such as the gigue (“Lavea tie/Primrose Path”) and the battaglia (“Taiston tie/Battle”).11 Throughout the piece, the composer displays a wide variety of references to early music, from the choice of Baroque instrumentation to the many stylistic references to music of the past. Moreover, the structure of the work itself, with its classic four-movement division, shows an authentic Baroque nature thanks to its diversified and rich expressiveness based on conflicting affects. Tiensuu’s sense of humor and passion for strong emotions seem to find fertile ground in this Baroque environment. On the other hand, period instruments can explore new timbres and effects that do not appear at all in conflict with their particular nature. The choice of the traverso is not a mere exercice de style. What in Musica ambigua was still in its embryonic state takes on a more mature aspect in Tiet/Lots: the writing for the traverso reveals a deeper understanding of the instrument’s specific features and peculiarities when compared with their more implicit presence in Musica ambigua. While the recorder or the modern flute were still the favored choices in the piece composed in 1999, in Tiet/Lots they become only a second best: the recorder would not be as capable of expressing all the nuances of the piece as the traverso, nor would the modern flute find as good a balance with the viola da gamba or harpsichord as the one-keyed flute. In a rare lecture entitled “The Future of Music,”12 Tiensuu mentioned, perhaps unsurprisingly, the need for “acknowledging the past”—but gave as his reason the need to “avoid involuntary plagiarism.”13 In certain respects such a notion is not all that far from the Schoenbergian concept of the newness that arises from historical awareness. Schoenberg saw the novelty in his music as deriving from a “search for precedent and the reconstruction of the past,”14 something he found

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute  99 in Brahms’s music especially and which allowed him the possibility of moving from symmetrical to “asymmetrical construction” and assigning a sense of modern “logic, economy and power of inventiveness” to his works, way beyond the “sweetness and beauty” of late romanticism.15 For Schoenberg, models existed not to be imitated but, rather, to be transcended. Tiensuu’s rough modeling of Musica ambigua on Telemann’s Nouveaux quatuors en six suites and his reinvention of Renaissance and Baroque program music (as in the prelude of Musica ambigua, and the gigue and the battaglia in Tiet/Lots) clearly arise from a thorough understanding of historical styles. But such aspects represent just one rather superficial trait of Tiensuu’s multifaceted musical personality. His ironic way of “playing with history” has been often used as an excuse for dubbing him antimodernist: Kalevi Aho referred to Tiensuu as the leading composer of a so-called “neo-neoclassical” trend.16 But, rather like the instinctively classicist figure of Schoenberg’s “Brahms, the progressive,” perhaps Tiensuu is no more academic or less progressive by virtue of his predilection for past instruments and Baroque formulas. The innovative features of his music need to be investigated beyond such chimeric “Baroque” appearances. His interest in mocking the stiffness of serious norms and playing a game between “the already said” and “eternal values” surely fits into the category of the postmodern, as expressed in Eco’s metaphor. Nevertheless, the path Tiensuu has chosen to take in order to achieve such a sarcastic dimension is neither conventional nor represents a “sophisticated way of avoiding” the route of “modern life,” to use Roger Scruton’s terms.17 In Tiensuu’s music, old instruments are constantly challenged to go beyond their traditional performance practice through his extensive use of microtonality, while the employment of advanced, albeit still idiomatic, techniques proves transformative with regard to the sound of all four instruments. The Franco-Belgian School: Jacqueline Fontyn and the PostImpressionist Traverso Contrary to Jukka Tiensuu’s consistent output of works conceived for the harpsichord and its Baroque companions (and a first-hand experience in the field of early music as harpsichord player), Jacqueline Fontyn’s encounter with period instruments has been somewhat accidental but no less interesting or original. Commissioned by the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Paris, La fenêtre ouverte was composed in 1996 and written for one-keyed flute, viola da gamba, and harpsichord.18 As Fontyn writes in the introduction to her piece, this work was inspired by the French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and the French composer François Couperin (1668–1733). These two inspirational figures help us to locate Fontyn’s aesthetics within the Franco-Belgian post-impressionist tradition. Her predilection for the flute seems to be in line with a long French tradition arguably stretching back to the Baroque and revived with Debussy, passing through neoclassical composers such as Roussel and Koechlin up to Messiaen.19 Amongst solos, chamber music works, and concertos, she has written about 25 titles for the instrument.

100  Matteo Gemolo Other than in La fenêtre ouverte, period instruments have been employed in just two other pieces: Shadows, a short impromptu for harpsichord composed in 1991, and Es ist ein Ozean, a double concerto for flute, harpsichord, and string orchestra composed in 2000. Though the concerto is written for the modern flute, the traverso offers a convincing alternative:20 In the second part of the first movement, “Praeludium,” the traverso seems better suited than the modern flute to the long series of quotations from J. S. Bach’s output—quotations that are interconnected with modal variations for the string orchestra.21 The music of J. S. Bach has been part of Fontyn’s life since childhood,22 and even in La fenêtre ouverte the echo of Bach’s contrapuntal writing reverberates throughout, as in the fugato style in its second movement. The obvious influence of impressionistic and post-impressionistic aesthetics on Fontyn’s musical language is evident in her textural attention to timbres and the overall gestural function that many of the motifs employed in La fenêtre ouverte appear to have: instead of following syntactic norms and serialist convention, the overlapping of different rhythmic patterns (such as the triplets, quadruplets, and quintuplets in the incipit of the trio), the rhapsodic and percussive effects produced in the fourth movement, and the wobbling sound masses created in the final “Maestoso” section all follow the Messiaen-inspired ideal (derived above all from “Mode de valeurs et d’intensités”) of emphasizing the tone-quality of individual, isolated sounds and deconstructing any superordinate formal structure derived by harmonic hierarchies or melodic phrasing. This rejection of thematicism (to adopt Boulezian language) is accompanied by a well-informed and attentive use of unusual instruments such as the traverso, the viola da gamba, and the harpsichord. What might at first glance seem an impossible mélange between two very different traditions (namely Baroque and post-impressionist music) turns out to be a promising source of new textural experiences. But the truly innovative aspect of Fontyn’s music lies in her ability to channel such a stratification of special effects into a more profound search for human affects. If it is true that the decision to employ Baroque instruments can sometimes result merely in a postmodern free play of ideas and forms, Fontyn’s use of such instruments comes across as a sincere attempt to integrate a specific aesthetic, that of French post-impressionism, with ideas inspired by the Affektenlehre, the so-called “doctrine” proposed by twentieth-century scholars in an attempt to codify the affective devices of Baroque composers.23 The result is an original contribution that, while remaining idiomatic, serves genuinely to broaden the spectrum of sound possibilities available from period instruments. The Canadian School Before it became a successful trend in Europe, the idea of writing new compositions for the traverso took hold strongly in Canada. In Pereksta’s 2001 survey of new works for the one-keyed flute, one figure stands out especially: Canadian flautist Elissa Poole. A tireless player, Poole has commissioned hundreds of works over the past few decades. The American composer Linda Catlin Smith was the first to begin a collaboration with her in 1982. That year she dedicated to Poole

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute  101 a piece for soprano, traverso, and harpsichord entitled Gray Broken. Two years later, Smith composed a solo for traverso, La Céline. Eventually, Poole’s ensemble Les Coucous Bénévoles commissioned and later recorded her third work, entitled Versailles and scored for traverso, violin, and harpsichord. A number of the traverso’s traits, such as its paucity of vibrato, its pure interval tuning, and its soft, dark timbres are exploited by Smith with the aim of creating an imaginary soundscape in which the audience “could hear every moment, every sound intimately.”24 Her fragile harmonies and gentle minimalism—consisting of simple, repeated, and seemingly handcrafted musical motifs—find their matching sonic dimension in the tone color of period instruments.25 Compared to Smith’s works, the music of the Canadian composer Rodney Sharman makes far more consistent use of repetitions, counterpoint, and drones. Sharman’s language is often microtonal and closer to spectral music: “A lot of my ideas come from the resonance and properties of the instruments themselves.”26 What is interesting in his works is the exploration of sound in all its mutable aspects, such as timbre, tempo, and dynamics, far beyond traditional harmonic spectra. Thanks to his deep knowledge of the instrument and his inventive employment of extended techniques, he can emphasize the traverso’s extreme pitch flexibility and tender timbral palette. Sharman has composed five works for the one-keyed flute, combining it with both modern and Baroque instruments: Orestes (1980), a chamber opera; Erstarrung (1984) for Baroque flute, bass clarinet, mandolin, guitar, harp, percussion, violin, and double bass; Dark Glasses (1988) for Baroque flute, bass clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello, and double bass; After Truth (1994) for Baroque flute and percussion; and Snared Harmonies (2017) for Baroque flute, two Baroque violins, viola, cello, bass viola da gamba, and twomanual harpsichord. Already a flautist and recorder player, Sharman discovered the early recordings of Nikolaus Harnoncourt at a young age, which would have a strong influence on his training as a musician and composer: If you look at my output, you’ll see how many pieces have mandolin and guitar and harp together, sometimes with percussion, sometimes without, and this is a kind of replication of the beautiful continuo sounds that I heard in Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s recordings in the 1970s, which had archlute, theorbo, harpsichord and Baroque harp simultaneously. And it was all layered so when they would play a figure, it would be smeared by the sounds of the three players playing approximately the same thing at slightly different times, which is also a feature of much of my music.27 This feature is particularly strong in two of his works for the traverso: After Truth and Snared Harmonies. In the former, Sharman makes the timbre of the traverso blend perfectly with the sound of the vibraphone: through constant changes of meter and overlapping of rhythms, the two instruments chase each other in a swirling litany. In Snared Harmonies, Sharman achieves an even more destabilizing effect using a microtonal language. The first and second sections of the piece are characterized by a fluctuating rhythmic pattern played by the strings in contrary

102  Matteo Gemolo motion and in arpeggios in the harpsichord; entirely consonant at the start, the line played by the strings is slowly and subtly modified by the introduction of microtonal intervals. This results in a distorted lullaby, often interrupted by short traverso solos, typified by a series of microtonal glissandos on the same pitch. The same dualism that emerged in After Truth through the dialectical relationship between two different instrumental timbres is here translated into a tension between the plaintive first section of the piece and its soothing and concluding second part. As its title suggests, Snared Harmonies represents an impossible attempt to grasp the elusive harmonies that are hidden in the piece: their faltering heterophonic character leaves us with the final impression of an ephemeral timbre mirage. Misconceived Works: The Risk of Caricature and Exoticist Cliché Within the constantly evolving contemporary repertoire for the traverso, far too many compositions have still been intrinsically conceived with a modern flute mindset, showing the composer’s lack of interest in the specific features of the one-keyed flute. The traverso has too often been regarded as simply old-fashioned or exotic, a sort of undeveloped prototype of the Boehm flute to be exploited for its uneven temperament and through the use of Baroque effects such as the flattement. One example in what I consider a series of misconceived works is one that Elissa Poole commissioned in 1990, a piece entitled Lo spazio stellato si riflette in suoni, for amplified flute and percussion, by the Italo-Australian composer Claudio Pompili. The piece was originally conceived for the one-keyed flute and later reworked by Elissa Poole on the eight-keyed flute owing to its extreme chromatic phrasing: “It jumped around to an extraordinary degree, very high to very low, and the passagework was not at all easy for fingering—so much of it in the highest part of the range expected to speak clearly.”28 Next to Pompili’s Japanese-inspired work, John Thow’s To Invoke the Clouds is a further example of such an Orientalist postmodernist trend. Written in 1995 in honor of Luciano Berio’s seventieth birthday, the piece for traverso and live electronics (and later revised for solo traverso or, alternatively, two traversos or modern flutes without live electronics) is inspired by the rainmaking rituals of Native American tribes and enriched by chromatic scales, embellishments, flattements, microtones, and a few contemporary effects. Nevertheless, these extended techniques, instead of becoming means of emancipation or idiomatic writing, paradoxically reinforce a rather rudimentary form of “decorative” Orientalism. Thow’s need for a quick exotic stimulus leads him to mistake the “pastness” of the traverso for what Edward Said dubs a place “of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and remarkable experiences.”29 Like Pompili’s Lo specchio del fiore, Thow’s To Invoke the Clouds fails to transform the idiomatic features of the Baroque flute into new “grammatical paradigms.”30 In the cases of both Pompili and Thow, the one-keyed flute is exploited for its superficial characteristics (namely its unstable tuning, airy sounds, and woody timbre). A predictable use of certain extended techniques seems to challenge the instrument with puerile

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute  103 questions such as: “what do you want to be when you grow up?” The only answer the traverso is able to mumble is: “when I grow up, I want to be an indigenous flute!” Conclusion The atomization of stylistic cohesion, a common sense of self-referentiality and historical relativism, along with a sprinkling of irreverence and irony are the most recurrent features of the contemporary repertoire for the traverso. Some, but by no means all, of these features might permit themselves to be aligned with postmodern tendencies. A few of these works have combined atonality with tonality and modality, replacing the compact stylistic unity commonly associated with modernism with a miscellany of multiple systems. Other compositions have made extensive use of quotations from the music of the past, evoking the Wittgensteinian possibility of a “language game” which can radically transform the meaning of a specific musical motif each time the aesthetic context and the environmental rules change. Indeed, one of the first things that has emerged in the study of this repertoire has been the high degree of subjectivity which separates the aesthetic of one composer from that of another. The lack of a shared and common vocabulary has left room for different compositional techniques, cross-pollination between genres, and seemingly endless possibilities. Another prevalent feature of this repertoire is a renewed form of expressiveness: contemporary composers have often employed instruments of the Baroque as means with which to reconnect with the Affektenlehre tradition of the eighteenth century. Their search for a refined palette of sound possibilities has sought to provoke a series of rationalized emotional states. The expressive potential of such bundles of early-music signifiers can be both reinvigorated through the interaction of extended techniques and decontextualized from their original (strictly tonal) environment. The “free play of signifiers”—stylistic elements no longer attached to their usual contexts and meanings—can be interpreted as a direct consequence of a “detached sense of nostalgia,” which, as John Butt suggests, transforms period styles and idioms into objets trouvés.31 Prevalent characteristics of HIP—which once constituted only the trademark of the “historically informed sound”—have now entered the realm of contemporary music, too. Besides making the early music movement recognizable to a large audience, a select number of habits have slowly evolved into a fixed set of norms to be applied often regardless of their historical context, including:

• The use of messa di voce to produce an exquisite effect of dynamic tension. • The use of uneven articulation to create a subtle effect of grace and fluidity. • The use of lower standardized pitches (e.g., A = 415 or 392) to offer a darker and less piercing sound quality compared to modern orchestras.

• The use of auxiliary notes to execute trills, often followed by a resolution. • A straight non-vibrato instrumental tone to counter the endless fluctuation of pitch that is characteristic of modern playing.

104  Matteo Gemolo What contemporary composers have often done is extrapolate such rules from their allegedly original context and relocate and transform them in order to find new idioms and practices that could inspire a genuine change in aesthetic: even when instruments from the past “not designed with the same stability and dependability as their more modern equivalents”32 are retrieved, “art remains about creating what does not already exist.”33 Over the last four decades, the use of past instruments such as the traverso has furthered such a creative exploration toward newness. And newness of any kind is never “created ex nihilo or in a vacuum. It is differentially defined, and therefore predicated inevitably on a stocktaking of the past.”34 Even the employment of advanced techniques has become “authentic” from the singular perspective of period instruments: idiomaticity as a key to innovation. We are indeed at the very beginning of a new and promising phase which will necessitate much in the way of evolution and expansion. The traverso’s past is indeed no longer a foreign country, while its future remains a land yet to be conquered. Notes 1 Since its birth in 2005, and alongside more traditional repertoire for period instruments, B’Rock Orchestra have been performing twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, including works by John Cage, Luciano Berio, Benjamin Britten, Arvo Pärt, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. The Finnish Baroque Orchestra has commissioned works from Jukka Tiensuu, Sarah Nemtsov, and Heiner Goebbels. In 2006, Harmonia Mundi released a CD entitled About Baroque (HMC 905187.88), on which the Freiburger Barockorchester premiered a series of pieces that the orchestra had commissioned from young composers. In September 2019, the Dunedin Consort, directed by John Butt, premiered four new works, written to accompany a performance of J. S. Bach’s four orchestral suites at the BBC Proms. 2 A world premiere recording of Anspielungen is featured in Matteo Gemolo and Europa Ritrovata, Affect Is No Crime: New Music for Old Instruments (Arcana/Outhere Music A116, 2018). 3 Linda H. Pereksta, “Twentieth-Century Compositions for the Baroque Flute” (DM Diss., School of Music, Florida State University, 2001), 46. 4 Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 67–68. 5 Sinclair McKay, “Don’t Mess with Barbara Cartland,” The Telegraph, August 15, 2013, https://www​.telegraph​.co​.uk​/culture​/books​/10243791​/Dont​-mess​-with​-Barbara​ -Cartland​.html (accessed November 20, 2022). Rhodophobia is the fear of all shades of pink. 6 Kimmo Korhonen, “New Music of Finland,” in New Music of the Nordic Countries, ed. John David White and Jean Christensen (New York: Pendragon, 2002), 121–286. 7 Kalevi Aho refers to Tiensuu as the leading composer of the “neo-neoclassical” group. Kalevi Aho, “Trends in Postwar Finnish Music,” Nordic Sounds 4 (1993): 3–9. 8 Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13–26. 9 For more on this subject see also Matteo Gemolo, “Jukka Tiensuu’s New Music for the Traverso,” Flutist Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2018): 26–31. 10 A world premiere recording of Tiet/Lots is featured in Affect Is No Crime: New Music for Old Instruments, CD, Arcana/Outhere Music A116, 2018, Matteo Gemolo & Europa Ritrovata.

A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute  105 11 The stile concitato or “agitated style” is here used by Tiensuu with the same rhetorical intention as in the Baroque—that of surprising and exciting the listener with a sequence of percussive and dissonant effects in order to reproduce the empty sound of war. The employment of extended techniques such as col legno, the tapping of the wood of the bow on the instrument, recalls the Battalia à 9 (1673) by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. 12 Since the 1980s Tiensuu has been officially refusing to comment on his own music, producing no commentaries on his music (such as liner notes) nor giving interviews. 13 Jukka Tiensuu, “The Future of Music” Conference paper, Search Event I, University of California, San Diego, April 16, 2000), https://tiensuu​.fi​/FutureOfMusic​.pdf (accessed November 1, 2016). 14 David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2005), 112. 15 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 435. 16 Aho, “Trends in Postwar Finnish Music,” 3–9. 17 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 493. 18 In 2002 the trio was re-worked for modern flute, cello, and piano at the request of the Wolpe Trio. A world premiere recording of La fenêtre ouverte is featured in Matteo Gemolo and Europa Ritrovata, Affect Is No Crime. 19 Jacqueline Fontyn, Nulla dies sine nota: autobiographie, entretiens, analyses et témoignages (Château Gontier: Editions Aedam Musicae, 2014), 93. 20 Jacqueline Fontyn, extract from a personal interview with the author, July 16, 2016. 21 Among the works quoted is the Sonata in B minor for flute and harpsichord BWV 1030. 22 Bach was a notable feature of Fontyn’s earliest lessons with the Belarusian pianist Ignace Bolotine, a student of the Russian pianist, composer, and conductor Alexandre Ziloti (1863–1945), who was himself a student of Franz Liszt. In a recent interview with Bruno Peeters, Fontyn has admitted that “I play every day at least one of his Preludes and Fugues for the Well-Tempered Clavier or one of his suites or partitas”; Fontyn, Nulla dies sine nota, 93. 23 Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, Ways to a New Understanding of Music (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1988). 24 Linda C. Smith, “Contemporary Music Theory and Composition: Composing a Theory,” paper presented at the University of Ottawa, January 25, 2002, https://www​.catlinsmith​ .com​/writings​/composing​-a​-theory (accessed September 10, 2018). 25 Smith, “Contemporary Music Theory and Composition.” 26 Robert Rowat, “Rodney Sharman: I Go Wherever My Imagination Takes Me,” interview, January 16, 2018, https://www​.cbcmusic​.ca​/posts​/19544​/rodney​-sharman​-vancouver​-new​-music​-festival (accessed January 9, 2019). 27 Rowat, “Rodney Sharman.” 28 Elissa Poole, extract from a conversation with the author, May 6, 2015. 29 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 1. 30 György Ligeti, “Rhapsodische, unausgewogene Gedanken über Musik, besonders über meine eigenen Kompositionen,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 153, no. 1 (January 1993): 28. 31 John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160. 32 Butt, Playing with History, 129. 33 Charles Wilson, “Times Like the Present: De-Limiting Music in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson (London: Routledge, 2019), 275. 34 Wilson, “Times Like the Present,” 276.

7

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music Francis Knights

Introduction The clavichord, as an affordable, quiet, and portable instrument for individual study, had an important role in domestic music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in many countries. The early music movement, begun in the late nineteenth century,1 saw an important symbolic role for the revived clavichord as an emblem of past music thanks to the advocacy of Arnold Dolmetsch and his supporters, but actual instruments were not widely available for many decades and were also relatively slow to appear in recordings.2 In addition to its role in the early music movement, the instrument has also inspired new compositions from the twentieth century to the present day. This chapter will examine the genesis of different twentieth- and twenty-first-century clavichord styles, the instruments and performers that gave rise to them, and the ways in which contemporary composers have both built on the music of the past and explored ab initio the sonic possibilities of the instrument today.3 The Dolmetsches have claimed a continued use of the clavichord domestically in France in their family through the nineteenth century, thus giving the instrument a (just) unbroken history of use covering six centuries, and it is remarkable that the earliest modern reconstructions almost overlap with the last historic clavichords made.4 Nevertheless, many instruments still existed in the nineteenth century and, as they were relatively easy to keep in playing order,5 found use among some owners. It is possible that the repertoire played included even Frédéric Chopin and his contemporaries; both Anton Bruckner and Carl Nielsen owned and used clavichords, the latter apparently composing for his instrument (a large anonymous eighteenth-century Saxon-style clavichord) in the last few years of his life.6 The Instruments Dolmetsch’s small number of excellent historic copies made in the last decade of the nineteenth century seem to have made little actual impact, despite their merits.7 (Dolmetsch did however perform on clavichord at the White House in 1908.8) The more lightly strung four-octave instruments that he also designed and built from 1912 onwards were seen as having the advantage of a vibrato, one of the things that made the instrument unique. These were taken up by players like Violet Gordon Woodhouse,9 and the style influenced many later builders, being seen as portable DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-10

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  107 and affordable by comparison to copies of large Hass or Hoffman instruments.10 Almost no one else before the Second World War built clavichords modeled on originals: Victor Hammer was a rare exception. He had made two large instruments in Florence about 1929, closely based on a Joseph Luesser of c. 1800 which he then owned—these were actually the only historical copies built between 1914 and the early 1950s.11 As with the harpsichord, there is a perceptible division of new repertoire in Britain according to the type of instrument for which the music was written: “revival” instruments very loosely adapted from historical models (e.g., Dolmetsch, Thomas Goff, and Goble & Sons)12 or close copies of (usually) German originals by Hass, Hubert, and others. The tonal differences are considerable, and the music written for the very quiet, long-sustaining Goff clavichords, for example, does not transfer easily to eighteenth-century-type instruments. Fortunately, some of the revival instruments are attractive-sounding musical instruments in their own right—unlike most equivalent harpsichords—and will continue to have an important place for the modern repertoire, even if they are increasingly difficult to find in good condition. Many twentieth-century clavichord works conveniently keep to the C–d3 compass that was thought at the start of the period to be appropriate for the majority of Bach,13 and nearly all are for unfretted instruments (that is, where every pair of strings has its own key, rather than sharing two or three). Since the 1980s, the wider availability of historic copies—in styles dating between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—has led to modern works for these types of instrument, especially the powerful five-octave German clavichords suitable for C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart (for example, Roderik de Man’s Elongated Fingers of 2017). Only a few composers have gone beyond this FF–f3 compass, as in David Loeb’s Fleetings, with FF–a3; this was dedicated to Joan Benson, who then owned a 1780 Lindholm clavichord with such a range. Two particular design subsets include instruments that incorporate explicitly modern elements, such as the modern microtonal clavichord (works composed by Heiner Ruland, Stefan Müller, and Johann Sonnleitner)14 and the electric clavichord—that is, a clavichord with an added electric pickup, sometimes also used in jazz or popular music.15 The Hohner clavinet16 is a special type of such instrument also designed for the latter repertoire purpose. There are also a small number of classical pieces for the electro-acoustic clavichord designed and built by Renée Geoffrion, including Louis-Philippe Rivet’s Nomoi of the Great Olympian Divinities (2006). The Early Keyboard Revival The earliest work composed for the revived harpsichord was Francis Thomé’s Rigodon Op. 97 from the mid-1890s.17 A small number of solo works followed from composers like Busoni and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, as well as the instrument being used in orchestra scores and then in concertos, with notable works by Manuel de Falla (1926) and Poulenc (1929) written for Wanda Landowska, and that by Martinů (1935) for Marcelle de Lacour. The combination of adventurous performers

108  Francis Knights looking for exciting new harpsichord repertoire and composers intrigued by these new sounds led to a major flow of new works, with over 10,000 to date.18 However, relatively few of the leading recitalists were interested in the clavichord (Ralph Kirkpatrick was a rare exception), as it could play no part in their concert work, and, unhelpfully, Landowska herself was relatively hostile to the instrument.19 Some early inspiration did come from composers who discovered the clavichord directly. For example, Lord Berners (Gerald Tyrwhitt, 1883–1950) had a Rolls-Royce with a small Dolmetsch clavichord stored beneath the seat but sadly left no music for the instrument. There is a Max Beerbohm drawing of him playing a tiny clavichord (Figure 7.1), which is also reproduced in the Novello score of Peter Dickinson’s Suite for the Centenary of Lord Berners for Clavichord (1983), an anniversary musical tribute. As there were few concert performers to commission works for either recitals or teaching, clavichord repertoire evolved in four main ways: from composers who owned clavichords and wished to experiment with the sounds available (Herbert Howells, Jean-Jacques Dünki, and Alan Bullard, for example); from performers requesting works from composers they know; from institutional composition competitions (for example, the British Clavichord Society and the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival); or from wider calls for scores, again driven by performers (for example, David Bohn and Francis Knights). The availability of LP recordings from the 1960s did much to introduce the wider listening public to the clavichord, especially the Froberger, J. S. Bach, and C. P. E. Bach recordings by Fritz Neumeyer, Thurston Dart, and Michael Thomas. From the 1980s the instrument began to be introduced into certain conservatoires as part of a wider exploration for their early keyboard players, and this helped form a new generation of recitalists and teachers. The overall growth of the contemporary repertoire was and is significantly driven by performer commissions, with figures such as Susi Jeans (1911–1993), Virginia Pleasants (1911–2011), Thurston Dart (1921–1971), Michael Thomas (1922–1997), and Joan Benson (1925–2020), with Kathleen Crees and Annette Sachs also playing important roles.20 However, the first musical contribution actually came directly from a composer, with Herbert Howells’s Tudor-inspired set of musical portraits called Lambert’s Clavichord (1926–1927);21 it was named after photographer and instrument builder Herbert Lambert,22 and the composer used a clavichord borrowed from Lambert to write it. His second collection, much more substantial, difficult, and advanced in style, was published in 1961, but appreciation of it has been harmed by the incorrect belief that the works are more suited to the piano.23 Although a substantial portion of the two collections was recorded by Ruth Dyson in 1981, a complete recording on clavichord had to wait until Julian Perkins’s 2017 set, issued for the Howells one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary.24 The influence of early Howells, both in terms of English Pastoral style and the desire to create sets of short pieces, can be seen in Peter Dyson’s Adrian’s Booke (1972), in Alan Bullard’s Air and Gigue (1974) and Six Miniatures (1975), and in the 21 miniatures of Trevor Hold’s The Wadenhoe Clavichord Book (1987). While Neoclassical pieces set an initial fashion for the clavichord of a slightly

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  109

Figure 7.1  Max Beerbohm, Drawing of Lord Berners, titled “Lord Berners, Making More Sweetness than Violence.” Copyright of the Estate of Max Beerbohm. Reproduced by permission.

110  Francis Knights antiquarian musical kind, other individual post-War voices were also emerging, and Lennox Berkeley’s Prelude and Fugue (1960), Alan Ridout’s Suite for Clavichord (1961), the Five Diversions (1963) by Peter Dickinson, two substantial suites by Stephen Dodgson (1967, 1971), seven groups of pieces by Haward Clarke (1958–1974), and the uncompromising Sonatina by Alun Hoddinott (1964) showed a variety of responses to the instrument from within the post-War English tradition. One performer-maker took a particularly hands-on approach in generating repertoire: in the early 1960s Michael Thomas invited a number of leading composers to write for the clavichord and for a recording and loaned them instruments so that they could experiment at leisure.25 The resulting disc was a musical if not a technical success and included works by Lennox Berkeley, Anthony Scott, Robert Still, and Eugene Goossens, but only the first of these was published in score.26 Later music, especially on the continent, could be even more exploratory and avant-garde, and a surprising variety of works now exist;27 there is even a piece in graphic notation by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Chordophonie 2, mobile für Clavichord (1976). The most prolific contemporary composer was Piotr Lachert (1938–2018),28 who, between 1972 and 1979, created some 20 works for clavichord, nearly all premiered by Annette Sachs. Some of these combined clavichord with tape (“bande magnetique”) or slides and, in the case of the Concerto africain (1978), an orchestra. In such instances, amplification is a necessity. As with much modern clavichord repertoire, the difficulty of accessing scores and recordings means that an assessment of Lachert’s contribution to the repertoire is not yet possible.29 Germany was another country to experience a contemporary clavichord revival, the key work being Ernst Pepping’s Sonate 1 (1937), published as “for the piano” but with a composer’s note inside stating “für mein Klavichord,” followed by works from Walter Haacke and Kurt Hessenburg. A strong parallel tradition in the Netherlands includes music by Jan van Dijk, Ary Verhaar, Hendrik Andriessen, Louis Andriessen, Ton de Leeuw, Karel Goeyvaerts, Roderik de Man, and others. Comparable repertoire in Finland, France, and some other parts of Europe has largely been driven by performers. Despite the early presence of Dolmetsch and Dolmetsch-Chickering clavichords in the US, the composing tradition there has only really blossomed in the past few decades. Of the pioneers, David Loeb has been the largest single contributor, with ten works written over more than half a century, some of which include other instruments; the most recent of these, Wanderings (2020), explores the notational style of the French Baroque Prélude non mesuré. Alan Hovhaness, Daniel Pinkham, and Chris DeBlasio have also written for the instrument, but the largest single impetus has come from David Bohn’s “Daniel Blitz Clavichord Project” of 2017, a worldwide call for scores that generated 67 new works.30 Bohn had received a clavichord from his mother’s cousin Daniel Blitz (d. 2017) and placed a public call for works for the instrument in his memory; the only stipulations were that pieces should “contain 100 notes or less and be specifically written for this project.” The variety of responses received was impressive, as can be heard from the recordings.

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  111 Many of the pieces written over the last century were not published or widely circulated, and most are still difficult to obtain; individual, one-off works, such as Matyas Seiber’s effective Pezzo per il clavicordo (1951)31 (Figure 7.2), written for Susi Jeans, stood little chance of becoming known while they circulated in manuscript (if at all), regardless of their musical merits. The market for published modern clavichord music has always been very small (Thurston Dart’s 1960s commissioned series of “The Little Keyboard Books” for Stainer & Bell was an attempt to build this market32), and a number of works originally written for clavichord were eventually published with a generic “for keyboard” designation, such as Peter Dickinson’s Five Diversions (1963), Peter Maxwell Davies’ Four Lessons for Two Keyboards, Op. 81 (1978), and Walter Haacke’s Ausgefallene Einfälle. As well as recent pieces making use of historical fretting systems—which can be seen as an opportunity for new experiments rather than just a limitation on available chords33—such as Julia Usher’s Clavicle (2004; see Figure 7.3)34 or Alissa Duryee’s Forager’s Journal (2018),35 works using particular sonic effects have begun to appear. This is not a new idea: Friedrich Wilhelm Rust’s Sonata in G (c. 1780) contains instructions to create harmonics, pizzicato, and timpani effects by touching the strings.36 Tapping the case or soundboard or strumming the strings are effects that have been used a number of times, while Barry Guy’s Only Today (2006) asks for a paintbrush to sound the strings to the right of the bridge and Janet Oates’s Humming Suite (2021) requires carefully notated vocalized humming in all four movements. Haubenstock-Ramati’s Chordophonie 2 includes complicated instructions for performance, including tapping, pizzicato, clusters, fingernails, scratching, and silk or paper strips laid over the strings while playing. Minimalism is represented by Robert Moran’s Basha (1983) for four amplified clavichords (“amplified to an intense, aggressive volume,” according to the composer’s notes), where 17 short sections of repeated chords in varying rhythmic and harmonic patterns are overlapped in a non-metrical way to produce the effect of a “shimmering tapestry.” Competitions While composition competitions for the harpsichord have an established pedigree—the Aliénor Harpsichord Composition Competition in the US has been running since 1980,37 for example—it is only recently that the clavichord has received similar attention. Following on from a May 1997 British Clavichord Society recital by John Cranmer and Virginia Pleasants,38 it was decided to hold the first ever Clavichord Composition Competition in 2004. Forty-eight entries were received, nearly half of which came from outside the UK, and the five prize-winners were Gary Carpenter, Philippe Forget, Graham Lynch, Julia Usher, and Geoffrey Alan Taylor.39 A decade later, in 2018, the Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival held a composition competition; the prize-winners included Gabriele Toia and Alissa Duryee.40 Again, one of the goals—very successfully achieved—was to expand the

Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.2  Mátyás Seiber, Pezzo per il Clavicordo, bars 1–5, © 2021 Schott Music Ltd, London.

112  Francis Knights

Reproduced by permission of the composer.

Figure 7.3  Julia Usher, Clavicle, bars 1–11. Selected notes are plucked by the right hand.

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  113

114  Francis Knights instrument’s contemporary repertoire and engage new compositional voices, but the difficulty remains in getting scores into the hands of players. Ensemble Music Iconography and documentary sources indicate that the clavichord was used historically in domestic ensemble music, for example to accompany a solo voice or instrument;41 in modern times it has also been used for continuo on several recordings.42 As well as pieces mentioned above by Lachert and others, a number of works have combined clavichord in duet (Maxwell Davies), with viola da gamba or shinobue (David Loeb), and with shakuhachi (Yumi Hara Cawkwell). Outside the classical repertoire, amplified clavichords, the clavinet, and the electric clavichord have also been used in folk, pop, and jazz,43 with Oscar Peterson’s 1976 duo recording of music from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with guitarist Joe Pass being a particularly successful example; the instrument’s ability to bend notes appears to be part of its attraction. Some of these other styles, such as jazz and pop, have found their way into the classical repertoire, as seen in Ivan Moody’s Passacaglia (1982) and Michael Calabris’ Love, Deception, Delusion, & Counterpoint (2019), respectively. Conclusion While recent years have seen the emergence of a modern harpsichord recital canon,44 such a tradition for the clavichord has been much slower to appear. The Howells sets are still more admired than performed, while significant works by Pepping, Berkeley, Seiber, Goossens, Loeb, and many others await their first modern recordings. Of recent compositions, Graham Lynch’s suite Petenera (2005) is a particularly fine example, and new works are emerging at a good pace. A number of professional performers are leading the way, and through their advocacy—public clavichord recitals are now not uncommon—and hopefully through recordings, a group of modern works will eventually emerge as the core of the contemporary clavichord repertoire. Acknowledgment The author is grateful to the numerous composers and performers who have kindly supplied scores and recordings over the years, as well as to those who have been willing to undertake commissions for the clavichord. Notes 1 For the background, see Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988) and Nick Wilson, The Art of Re-Enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 Francis Knights, Clavichord Discography (Mytholmroyd: Peacock Press, 2020).

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  115 3 There is a complete catalogue of this repertoire in Francis Knights, Modern Music for the Clavichord (Mytholmroyd: Peacock Press, forthcoming); see also Frances Bedford, Harpsichord & Clavichord Music of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1993), Frances Bedford, “Twentieth Century Clavichord Music,” in De Clavicordio, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Susan Brauchli, and Alberto Galazzo (Turin: Musica Antica a Magnano, 1994), 259–264, and Joan Benson, “Clavichord (Repertoire),” in The Harpsichord and Clavichord: An Encyclopedia, ed. Igor Kipnis; volume 2 of Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments (London: Routledge, 2007), 78. 4 See, for example, Eva Helenius, “Aspects of the Clavichord in Sweden in the Nineteenth Century,” in De Clavicordio VII, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Alberto Galazzo, and Judith Wardman (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano, 2006), 45–62. The surviving attributed instruments are catalogued in Donald Boalch, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord, ed. Charles Mould, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), now updated online at https://boalch​.org (accessed April 8, 2023). 5 Lothar Bemmann, “The Decline and Revival of the Clavichord,” in De Clavicordio VI, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Alberto Galazzo, and Ivan Moody (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano 2006), 29–36. 6 On the use of the clavichord for music of Chopin, see Anna Maria McElwain, “A Clavichordist’s View of the Chopin Preludes” (unpublished paper, 2010), https://www​ .yumpu​.com​/en​/document​/read​/13422484​/a​-clavichordists​-view​-of​-the​-chopin​-preludes​-sibelius​-akatemia (accessed November 20, 2022), and Francis Knights, “Exploring Chopin on the Clavichord,” Tangents 14 (October 2019): 1–4. On Bruckner, see Garry Broughton, “Bruckner’s Clavichords,” The Bruckner Journal 20, no. 2 (July 2018): 17–18. On Nielsen’s use of the clavichord, see Mads Damlund and Joris Potvlieghe, “Carl Nielsen and the Clavichord,” Clavichord International 19, no. 2 (November 2015): 55–61. Nielsen’s set Piano Music for Young and Old, Op. 53 (1929/30) is suspiciously effective on the clavichord, despite its title. 7 See John Barnes, “The Parallel between the Harpsichord and Clavichord Revivals in the Twentieth Century,” in De Clavicordio II, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Susan Brauchli, and Alberto Galazzo (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano, 1996), 235. See also Gregory Crowell, “Clavichord Customers at Chickering & Sons, 1906–1914,” Clavichord International 16, no. 2 (November 2012): 42–46 and Larry Palmer, Harpsichord in America: A Twentieth Century Revival (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), ch. 2. In terms of actual production and availability in the post-1929 Crash era, Fortune magazine’s August 1934 article entitled “Clavichord Boom” seems wildly inaccurate; see Palmer, Harpsichord in America, 44–45. 8 Palmer, Harpsichord in America, 22–23. 9 The design seems to have originated as a result of her request for a portable instrument in 1912; see Peter Bavington, “Clavichords in Britain, No. 17: The Arnold Dolmetsch Clavichord at Fenton House,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 56 (June 2013): 7–11. 10 Jessica Douglas-Hume, Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: Harvill Press, 1996). 11 See Gregory Crowell, “Victor Hammer and the Revival of the Nineteenth-Century Clavichord,” in De Clavicordio X, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Alberto Galazzo, and Judith Wardman (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano, 2012), 53–62. 12 In the words of John Barnes, “The differences are in the thickness of the strings and sometimes the cross-sectional area of the bridge and the weight and balance of the keys”; Barnes, “The Parallel between the Harpsichord and Clavichord Revivals,” 234. The simple design of the clavichord prevents any major restructural thinking, but there is one interpretation using modern materials in the form of the Edelan aluminium clavichord; see https://myemail​.constantcontact​.com​/The​-edelan​-6061​-Aluminum​-Clavichord​.html​ ?soid​=1105784870832​&aid​=6n4qQS​-tLjA (accessed January 18, 2022).

116  Francis Knights 13 Goff did build a C–f3 model, and the standard Goble was AA–e3. 14 See Johann Sonnleitner, “The Clavichord in the Expanded Tone System,” in De Clavicordio V, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Alberto Galazzo, and Judith Wardman (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano, 2002), 63–71. 15 Lyndon Johann Taylor, “The Case for and against the Electric Clavichord,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 8 (June 1997): 7–10. 16 Huw Rees, “The Hohner Clavinet,” Clavichord International 17, no. 1 (May 2013): 6–13. 17 For the revival of the harpsichord, see Barnes, “The Parallel between the Harpsichord and Clavichord Revivals”; Larry Palmer, “Contemporary Harpsichord Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord, ed. Mark Kroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 324–346; and Chau-Yee Lo, “Endangered Species: The Harpsichord and Its New Repertoire since 1960” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Leeds, 2004). 18 The equivalent clavichord repertoire numbers around 500 works. 19 Richard Troeger, “Landowska and the Clavichord,” Harpsichord & Fortepiano 19, no. 1 (Autumn 2014): 7–8. 20 See Peter Brownlee, “Remembering Joan Benson,” Harpsichord & Fortepiano 25, no. 1 (Autumn 2020): 21–27. 21 See Larry Palmer, “Herbert Howells’ ‘Lambert’s Clavichord,’” Diapason 12 (December 1974): 7–8 and Bruce W. Glenny, “Herbert Howells: Aspects of Twentieth-Century English Revivalism as seen in ‘Lambert’s Clavichord,’” in Brauchli, Brauchli, and Galazzo, De Clavicordio II, 225–31. The most recent book on the composer, Phillip A. Cooke and David Maw, ed., The Music of Herbert Howells (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2013), has rather little to say on the clavichord music. 22 See Lynne Mirrey, “Pioneers of the English Clavichords Revival, 2: Herbert Lambert,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 41 (June 2008): 8–14 and Peter Bavington, “A Clavichord by Herbert Lambert,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 58 (February 2014): 3–16. 23 At the end of his life, the composer was on record as happy that they be played on “any available keyboard instrument”; Palmer, “Contemporary Harpsichord Music,” 327–328. 24 Julian Perkins, clavichord, Howells: Music for Clavichord (Prima Facie PFCD065/66, 2017). The author also performed both sets complete on clavichord in Cambridge in 2017. 25 Michael Thomas, “Modern Music for the Clavichord,” The Consort 18 (1961): 96–102. See also Thomas McGeary, “Michael Thomas (1922–2022): An Anniversary Tribute,” Harpsichord & Fortepiano 27, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 4–11. 26 Knights, Clavichord Discography, 204. Most of the performer’s scores from this project are in the possession of the present author. 27 Bedford, “Twentieth Century Clavichord Music,” 259–63; Knights, Modern Music for the Clavichord. 28 http://www​.lachertfoundation​.eu (accessed January 18, 2022). 29 There are a number of recordings on YouTube, sub “Annette Sachs.” Sachs is the key performer of the 1970s clavichord avant garde but has made no commercial recordings of this repertoire. 30 For sound recordings of the 46 selected works played by David Bohn, see the “Daniel Blitz Clavichord Project,” https://www​.youtube​.com​/channel​/UCWuE​-WHNgnWDuO​ _3Mme61rw (accessed January 18, 2022). 31 Now published by Schott (2021) from the manuscript in the British Library. 32 Composers included Haward Clarke, Beryl Price, and Alan Ridout. 33 Where two or three keys share a string, only one note can be played at a time, but some special effects can be achieved by hitting a second tangent against a string that is already sounding.

The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music  117 34 There is also a version not requiring fretting or soundbox effects called Clavicle Unstrung (2014). The work is discussed in Peter Bavington, “20th and 21st-Century Music for Clavichord,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 38 (June 2007): 2–11. 35 Recorded by Anna Maria McElwain, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=ksmRbo​ _ORec (accessed January 18, 2022). 36 See Ilton Wjuniski, “The Twelve Sonatas by Friedrich Wilhelm Rust Published by Vincent d’Indy and Their Performance on the Clavichord,” in De Clavicordio IX, ed. Bernard Brauchli, Alberto Galazzo, and Judith Wardman (Magnano: Musica Antica a Magnano, 2010), 101–105 and Luk Vaes, “Extraordinary Sounds and Techniques in Friedrich Wilhelm Rust’s Sonata in G,” Clavichord International 17, no. 1 (May 2013): 14–23; they have been recorded by Ilton Wjuniski, clavichord, Friedrich Wilhelm Rust: 12 Sonaten (Querstand VKJK 1421, 2017). 37 https://www​.his​tori​calk​eybo​ards​ociety​.org​/competitions​/alienor​-competition (accessed January 18, 2022). The last competition took place in 2022. 38 See Ruby Reid Thompson, “Twentieth-Century Music for the Clavichord,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 9 (October 1997): 8–9. Advice for composers by Francis Knights was provided online in guidelines subsequently published as “Composing for the Clavichord,” in International Clavichord Directory, ed. Judith Wardman, 2nd ed. (London: British Clavichord Society 2005), 9–10. 39 Peter Bavington, “The British Clavichord Society Awards for Clavichord Composition, 2004,” British Clavichord Society Newsletter 30 (October 2004): 20–23. 40 Anna Maria McElwain, “VII Nordic Historical Keyboard Festival,” National Early Music Association Newsletter 2, no. 2 (July 2018): 82–86. 41 For a catalogue of historic paintings, engravings, and other clavichord representations, see Bernard Brauchli, “A Comprehensive List of Iconographical Documents on the Clavichord,” in Brauchli, Brauchli, and Galazzo, ed. De Clavicordio (1994), 81–92, supplemented in successive volumes of this series; see also Bernard Brauchli, The Clavichord (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 281–294. 42 For example, by Lucy Carolan and Terence Charlston (Knights, Clavichord Discography). 43 More than 70 players are listed in Knights, Clavichord Discography, 236, including Tori Amos, Andrew Cronshaw, Herbie Hancock, Simon Jeffes, Booker T. Jones, and Paul McCartney. 44 Palmer, “Contemporary Harpsichord Music.”

8

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance J. Drew Stephen

From the first application of valves to brass instruments in the 1820s through the end of the nineteenth century, the natural horn and the valve horn coexisted as distinct instruments. They were identified by different names, taught in separate classes, attracted performers who specialized on one or the other, had separate repertoires, were used in different performing contexts, and were associated with different expressive meanings. Many composers even wrote for both instruments in the same composition, suggesting that the instruments were seen as complementary and even related but not interchangeable.1 Although the natural horn was considered the superior instrument by many, especially in terms of beauty of tone, the chromatic possibilities of valves became increasingly practical over time, causing the valve horn to be adopted as the instrument of choice by most players and composers by the end of the century. When the last bastion of the natural horn playing and instruction, the Paris Conservatoire, discontinued its natural horn class in 1903 and offered instruction only on the valved instrument, the valve horn was unequivocally accepted as the standard instrument and the natural horn was rendered obsolete.2 For the next 60 years and more, performers and composers focused exclusively on the valve horn, resulting in the loss of many of the techniques and practices that had defined the natural horn for the previous 200 years. It was only with the establishment of period instrument ensembles in the 1960s that interest in the natural horn reemerged and the difficult task of re-acquiring hand-horn techniques and practices was begun. While the natural horn today has mostly been associated with the music of the past, a repertoire has emerged over the last 40 years that uses the natural horn in new compositions (see the list in Table 8.1 in the Appendix to this chapter). By turning to an instrument once considered obsolete, composers and performers have rediscovered and reapplied the distinct features of the natural horn in contemporary music while also developing new directions in composition and performance practice. By blurring the distinction between old and new, composers have found new ways to write for the horn and established new practices. In this chapter I identify the new directions in modern horn performance and composition made possible through the revival of the natural horn in modern performance practice. To understand the implications of these new directions, I first provide some essential information on the instrument itself. DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-11

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  119

Figure 8.1  Harmonic series with out-of-tune pitches shaded.

The Historical Horn The natural horn has its origins in the French trompe de chasse, an instrument that appeared at the court of Louis XIV around 1680 for use in the courtly hunt. With an overall length of 454 cm (14.9 feet) formed into a distinctive hoop shape for ease of use, the instrument could produce the notes of the harmonic series up to the sixteenth partial. Since these pitches correspond to the pure ratios of the overtone series, several pitches—notably the seventh, eleventh, and thirteenth harmonics corresponding to a written b♭', f'', and a''—do not match the tuning of the equaltempered scale (Figure 8.1 and Table 8.2 in the Appendix). Moreover, since the instrument has a fixed length, it produces only a limited set of notes, associated with a single key, with significant gaps between intervals until the upper octave. None of this was problematic for the hunting horn, which was used primarily for communicating essential information about the hunt through signals. As the horn moved from the hunting field to the concert hall around the beginning of the eighteenth century, changes were applied to make the instrument more manageable and adaptable to the performance of concert music. Instead of holding the instrument with the bell high in the air to achieve the loud volumes required in the hunt, the bell was brought closer to the body to produce a warmer sound. Detachable lengths of tubing, called crooks, were introduced to change the instrument’s length, and thus its fundamental pitch, so it could be played in different keys. Since the length of the instrument affects the tone, this gave each key a distinct sound that created or supported the expressive meanings of music. As LouisFrançois Dauprat points out in the preface of his collection of Trios, Quartets, and Sextets for Horns in Different Keys (1815), each key on the horn has a timbre or quality of sound which is particular to it, and which is audible between the two closest keys, such as D and E-flat, E and F, etc. Consequently, if the difference in timbre is apparent at this small distance, how much more apparent will it be between two distant keys, such as G and C, or D and A. It will then appear that there are two different instruments; one full of strength and brilliance, the other of solemnity and gentleness.3 Although the music written for the horn remained initially within the confines of the harmonic series, a technique was developed using the hand in the bell to obtain non-harmonic series pitches. “Should you want to make the Cromatic [sic] tones,” explains the anonymous author of the New Instructions for the French Horn in 1780,

120  J. Drew Stephen you must hold the Horn with your Left or Right hand as near as you can to the Mouth-piece, the Bell to bear against your side, one hand must be within the Edge of the Bell ready to put into the Pavilion or Bell of the Horn as notes may require.4 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, this practice had developed from an elite technique associated with specialists to a basic skill expected of all advanced players. By covering the opening of the bell with the hand, the player lowers the pitch of the instrument to produce a pitch a half-step below a note of the harmonic series. By completely stopping the bell with the hand, the player effectively shortens the instrument to produce a pitch half-step above. This technique made it possible to obtain nearly all notes of the chromatic scale. Non-harmonic series pitches below the written e♭', where the gaps are larger and the notes are muffled and difficult to obtain, are largely avoided, but notes above e♭' occur regularly and composers clearly expected performers to obtain them in any performance context. Since the different hand positions modify the sound, giving each pitch its own distinct timbre, the natural horn demonstrated a kaleidoscopic range of colors that was appealing to listeners and used by composers to emphasize chromatic notes and enhance the expressive qualities of the music. In one of the most prominent natural horn passages in the literature, the fourth horn solo in the Adagio movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the composer makes extensive use of stopped notes, prompting the critic reviewing the second German performance of the symphony in Aix-laChapelle in May 1825 to observe that “the wind instruments breathe out a heavy sorrow and the horn in particular sounds a deeply melancholy appeal, so that everything appears to combine in uttering a silent-weeping lament” (Example 8.1).5 The Modern Revival In his Handbook of Modern Instrumentation (1866), Ferdinand Gleich complained that the “beautiful, noble, and fragrant sound” of the Waldhorn had almost disappeared with the adoption of valve horns in the orchestra and condemned the emerging practice of performing all horn parts on the valve horn in F regardless of the crook for which they were written. “For compositions that are intended and written for the valve horn,” he argued, “and therefore not feasible on the natural horn, this is a natural practice, but when applied to the works of Beethoven or Weber it is an act of vandalism.”6 While the shift to the valve horn

Example 8.1  Fourth horn solo from Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 (1824), III, bars 90–98. Stopped notes are indicated with + signs.

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  121 certainly allowed more flexibility in late romantic and post-tonal contexts, it also meant that the characteristic features of the natural horn, including the variety of colors obtained from the use of different crooks and idiomatic hand stopping, were largely abandoned. The definitive shift to the valve horn around 1900 brought what Gleich had considered an act of vandalism into standard practice. From this point on, the valve horn was used exclusively to perform the music of both the present and the past, and the distinctive features of the natural horn largely were abandoned. Horn scholar Reginald Morely-Pegge, writing in 1942, lamented that the use of the right hand was “too little understood and many players treat the hand merely as a peg on which to hang the instrument.”7 Just a few years later, horn virtuoso Dennis Brain demonstrated the natural horn as part of a video performance of Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, which of course he performed on the valve horn. Brain noted that “you get one good note and one less good, but that, of course, is a feature of this instrument which is called the hand horn.”8 Until the reemergence of the natural horn in performances and recordings by period instrument ensembles in the late 1960s, there were few, if any, opportunities to hear the natural horn or even consider how the instrument might be used in a modern compositional context. It was largely as an outgrowth of the period instrument movement that new, original compositions for the natural horn first appeared, but even that would take almost a decade. Before addressing the main repertoire of new compositions that appeared in the 1980s, it will be helpful to discuss Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, a piece that is remarkable not only for the sophistication of the horn writing, but also for its inclusion of natural horn tunings in 1944 (a list of selected works for valve horn using natural horn tunings is in Table 8.3 in the Appendix). Written 40 years after the natural horn was abandoned at the Paris Conservatory at the beginning of the century, and almost 40 years before the appearance of the first original works for natural horn at the end of the century, it stands apart from any other similar work. Unlike the inner movements, which are written for valve horn, the outer movements, for horn alone, use only natural harmonics, including the unaltered tunings of the seventh, eleventh, and fourteenth partials (Example 8.2).9 Britten composed the work for Dennis Brain, who used the open notes of the F crook on his valve horn for the first performances and recordings in the 1940s but later switched to a Raoux hand horn of 1818 for the outer movements in performances and recordings in the 1950s.10 Although it may seem obvious today how effectively the natural tunings of the prologue and epilogue establish the atmosphere of innocence and nostalgia that is conveyed so vividly in the poetry and music of the intervening songs, the natural tunings were not immediately understood or appreciated by all listeners. Brain confided to a friend after a few performances that he wished he had never suggested using natural harmonics, adding that it was a nuisance to have to explain, in program notes or otherwise, why the passages sounded out of tune.11 Brain’s frustration was not misplaced. When the 1953 studio recording of the serenade was reviewed in the scholarly contemporary music journal Tempo, reviewer Eric Thompson noted that

122  J. Drew Stephen

Example 8.2  “Prologue,” from Benjamin Britten, Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings, op. 31, bars 1–14. Natural tunings are indicated by asterisks. © 1944 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

the only disappointments here lie in the opening and closing horn solos; a curiously faulty intonation is apparent here and there which jars the magic of both the Prologue and Epilogue. Fortunately this disappears in the first song and from then on Dennis Brain’s customary musicianship and brilliance are very much in evidence.12 This prompted a letter from Britten himself who clarified that “the horn is directed to play on the natural harmonics of the instrument; this causes the apparent ‘outof-tuneness’ of which your reviewer complains and which is, in fact, exactly the effect I intend.”13 The natural tunings that were perceived as jarring and unusual at mid-century started to be accepted as desirable features in the 1970s. Olivier Messiaen’s solo horn movement, “appel interstellaire,” from Des canyons aux étoiles (1974) contains passages in which the player is instructed to use the fingerings for a horn in D, “comme la trompe de chasse” (like the hunting horn) to produce natural harmonics, including the eleventh partial. Eugene Hartzell’s Monologue 10 (1977), part of his series of monologues for all orchestral instruments, uses only natural tones, without valves, for the first 28 bars, and Henri Pousseur’s Naturel, written for the 1981 International Horn Competition in Liège, is written to be performed entirely on natural harmonics. The most extensive and influential application of this technique occurs in György Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano of 1982. Although written for the modern double horn, Ligeti instructs the player to use specific valve combinations to produce the tuning of the natural harmonics. Since the natural tunings of the horn co-exist in this piece with the equal-tempered tunings of the piano and the pure intervals of the violin, Ligeti intentionally juxtaposes the conflicting tuning systems to achieve the aural complexity of the work.14 It was shortly after composers began incorporating elements of natural horn writing in their modern compositions that the first new pieces written explicitly for the natural horn began to appear in the 1980s. Many were linked to the period

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  123 instrument movement and written for natural horn competitions in America and West Germany that were founded at this time.15 These modern test pieces for solo natural horn were composed by established and respected horn players, including Hermann Baumann, Bernhard Krol, Vitali Bujanowski, and Lowell Greer, or composers with an affinity for the horn including Hans Pflüger, Alun Francis, and Jean-Luc Darbellay. All demonstrate a keen understanding of the horn and its capabilities, and they established practices for a core repertoire that demonstrates the wide range of colors and effects that were possible on the natural horn and serve as models for other composers. As Hella Baumann reported after the second Bad Harzburg competition in 1987, the competition organizers hoped that “not only the historical playing of the hand horn should be stimulated and led to artistry but modern composers should be given the idea of what can be discovered with this old-new instrument.”16 It is really from this point on that a viable modern repertoire of natural horn compositions emerged. A Surprisingly Capable, if Idiosyncratic, Instrument I enjoyed writing all these movements specifically for the natural horn and at every point in the process it seemed to feel just right. By way of justification, if any is needed, I like to think that the natural horn deserves to be considered, even in our modern times, as a perfectly good and valid instrument in its own right and not merely as a historical artifact. Despite the simplicity of the natural horn and its apparent lack of a full chromatic stock of notes it is a surprisingly capable, if idiosyncratic, instrument. Most things seem to be playable on it—albeit sometimes as the result of desperate struggles—and it came as a surprise to me that at no point during the writing of any of the four movements did I find the instrument unable to do something I wanted to add.17 Pip Eastop’s description of the process of composing Set the Wild Echoes Flying (2016) for natural horn and narrator provides a helpful perspective on the newly established status of the natural horn in modern composition. Although still considered by many to be an outdated instrument with limitations, Eastop demonstrates its capabilities in modern contexts. The idiosyncrasies of the instrument may create desperate struggles for the performer and the composer, but they have led to remarkable innovations and established new directions in compositional practice. To understand the full impact of the natural horn in modern composition, I turn to three representative works in different genres. This reveals the individual responses to the instrument and allows for a richer understanding of how the natural horn has been used in modern composition. Hermann Baumann, Elegia für Naturhorn (1984)

Hermann Baumann was one of the first modern performers to use the natural horn in early music performances, one of the first to record the standard repertoire on natural horn, the founder of the International Competition for Hand Horn in Bad

124  J. Drew Stephen Harzburg, Germany, and a tireless advocate whose playing and enthusiasm provided a model and inspiration for many compositions in the modern repertoire. It is fair to say that the current repertoire for natural horn and the general standard of playing would not be nearly as robust without Baumann’s contributions. Even though the Elegia is one of the earliest pieces in the modern repertoire, it remains one of the best examples of what can be achieved on the natural horn today. Baumann’s Elegia focuses mainly on natural tunings and contrasts of open and stopped notes with the seventh and eleventh harmonics featured prominently. The piece does not require an advanced agility in hand stopping technique, with most of the stopped pitches easily attainable, but there is a low b♭ below middle c which is difficult to obtain and was largely avoided in the traditional repertoire due to lack of clarity. Baumann incorporates many modern techniques, including flutter tonguing, gradually accelerating trills, and glissandi into the high register. One of the most effective techniques is a slow portamento between open and stopped notes that occurs in the closing bars. As with many solo natural horn works, the crook or key of the piece is not specified and left up to the performer. Baumann composed and dedicated the work in memory of a former student, Francesco Raselli, and makes very effective use of both modern techniques and stopped notes to express stages of grief from sadness, anger, and resignation to acceptance (Example 8.3). Although the elegiac elements are achieved largely through musical gestures, they are amplified by the natural horn’s strong associations with the past. By writing for horn alone, Baumann and others were free to explore natural tunings without reconciling them with instruments using traditional tuning systems. This seems to have been a common practice until the end of the 1990s, with the bulk of the early repertoire clearly devoted to solo pieces. Still, even though there are only a few uses of the natural horn in chamber settings, this did not limit the possibilities. Jonathan Dove’s Figures in the Garden (1991) demonstrates imaginative uses of the natural horn in modern compositional styles.

Example 8.3  Hermann Baumann, Elegia für Naturhorn, opening. Natural tunings are indicated with asterisks; stopped notes by + signs. © 1984 by Bote & Bock Musik- und Bühneverlag GMBH & Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  125 Jonathan Dove, Figures in the Garden (1991)

Dove’s use of period instruments in Figures in the Garden was imposed as a circumstance of the project. The work was one of five wind serenades commissioned by the Glyndebourne Opera in 1991 as part of their Mozart Bicentenary Celebration. Each composer was given an opera by Mozart and asked to write a serenade for an outdoor performance before the opera.18 Dove was assigned The Marriage of Figaro and, since the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment had been engaged for the opera, the wind players, playing period instruments, would also perform the serenade. Dove was attracted to the concept of a serenade in the garden before performances of an opera whose last act is set in a garden and which itself includes a number of serenades. “I had the idea,” he wrote, “that with all the performances of The Marriage of Figaro that had taken place at Glyndebourne, sounds from the opera had in some way impregnated the garden: snatches of recitative, musical figures, instrumental colors.”19 Dove’s composition quotes source material from the opera and features an ensemble and instruments that would have been familiar to Mozart, yet the musical style is contemporary with clear departures from past practices in the instrumental writing, especially in his writing for natural horn. Dove had some experience writing for the valve horn prior to the project, but he had not previously grappled with the peculiarities of crooks and the harmonic series. Since he was using eighteenth-century source material and writing diatonically, with each movement conceived in a particular key, the natural horn suited his compositional style even if the melodies he wanted were not always perfectly conceived for the harmonic series. Instead of placing both horns in the same key, which was the standard practice in the eighteenth century, Dove often crooks the horns in different keys and shares a melody between the two horns. This approach was suggested by the horn players in the ensemble, prompting Dove to make side-by-side comparisons of harmonic series charts to see what notes they had in common and then divide melodies according to these possibilities. This resulted in the long flowing melody that ends the fifth movement, “The Countess Interrupts a Quarrel.” Dove passes the melodic material seamlessly between the first horn in D and the second horn in C to create a melody that does not follow traditional natural horn contours yet makes logical use of the natural horns in a modern context. Another instance of Dove’s unusual approach to the horn occurs in the second movement, “Susanna in the Rain.” The melody, which is assigned to the horn, is a drawn-out version of Mozart’s Act IV aria “Deh vieni, non tardar.” Dove liked the idea of singing a Mozart tune, but doing so on the horn, which is something that Mozart would not have done. It is not that the melody does not suit the horn—just that it is not an idiomatic approach to horn writing used in the eighteenth century.20 György Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto (1998/99)

If there were any doubts about the natural horn’s capabilities as a vehicle for contemporary composition, these are quelled by Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto for solo

126  J. Drew Stephen horn, four obbligato natural horns, and chamber orchestra. Written at the peak of his career—this was Ligeti’s last completed work—the concerto has garnered welldeserved attention as one of the most important modern contributions to the horn repertoire. It also contains some of the most sophisticated, imaginative, and original writing for natural horn in contemporary music. Ligeti extends the techniques developed in his Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano (1982) by combining a solo horn, switching between a natural horn in F and a valve horn in F/B♭, with a quartet of natural horns pitched in different keys. “In this piece,” explains Ligeti, I experimented with very unusual non-harmonic sound spectra … By providing each horn or group of horns with different fundamentals I was able to construct novel sound spectra from the resulting overtones. These harmonies, which had never been used before, sound “weird” in relation to harmonic spectra. I developed both “weird” consonant and dissonant harmonies with complex beats.21 The focus of the Hamburg Concerto is clearly the solo horn, but the four ensemble horns play a prominent role to demonstrate a high level of technical proficiency and a facility similar or even identical to that of the soloist. Unlike the solo part, which alternates natural horn and valve horn, the ensemble parts are scored for natural horns throughout with multiple crook changes: three crooks (E, E♭, and D) for the third and fourth horns and two crooks (F and E) for the first and second horns. Apart from a single chord in the sixth movement, where the four horns transform an open chord to a stopped chord, no hand technique is required by the ensemble horns. Ligeti is instead interested in the natural tunings of the open notes of the harmonic series—a point that is clarified in his performance notes in the printed score. “The four natural horns,” instructs Ligeti, “always produce non-tempered natural harmonics; therefore the right hand must not correct the pitches.”22 Without using the hand in the bell to adjust pitches, these tunings occur naturally, but Ligeti also codifies the tunings in the score by indicating the harmonics above pitches that deviate from standard tuning and using arrows with differently shaded heads to show the approximate deviations: just a bit lower (14 cents or 15% flat) for the fifth harmonic, lower (31 cents or 30% flat) for the seventh harmonic, and a quartertone lower (49 cents or 50% flat) for the eleventh harmonic.23 Ligeti also indicates fully stopped and half stopped notes when they appear in the solo horn in the third movement (natural horn in F) and the fourth movement (valve horn using valves to achieve the natural tunings of different crooks). By focusing on the distinct tunings of the natural horn—not only the obvious seventh, eleventh, and thirteenth harmonics but also the more subtle fifth and tenth harmonics—Ligeti creates “dirty” harmonies.24 This term is derived from Ligeti’s own description of his Requiem, in which the singers perform chromatic scales. “What you actually hear,” Ligeti observes there, “is not a chromatic scale, since the singers cannot help making mistakes in the intonation, which produces a kind of microtonality, dirty patches, and these ‘dirty patches’ are very important.”25 Ligeti intentionally uses the natural tunings of the horns to create similar dirty patches in

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  127 the Hamburg Concerto, an approach that can be seen at the beginning of the opening “Praeludium” movement. The movement begins with the sustained dyad of a major second held at pianissimo in the third and fourth horns (Example 8.4). Crooked in e♭ on the eighth and ninth harmonics, the written c'' and d'' produces a sounding e♭' and f'. The third and fourth horns are joined by the first and second horns crooked in F and playing the seventh and eighth harmonics to produce the same sounding pitches with discrepancies in tuning due to the lowered seventh harmonic in the second horn.26 The “dirty” dyad unfolds in wedge-like fashion with the third and fourth horns

Example 8.4  “Praeludium,” from György Ligeti, Hamburg Concerto, bars 1–7. Horns sound as notated. Copyright © 1999 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors Company, sole US and Canadian agent for Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz, Germany.

128  J. Drew Stephen expanding by a step to produce an e♭ thirteenth chord which is doubled by the flutes and basset horns. The resulting cluster, comprised not only of a narrow range of pitches but also a clash of tuning systems, further dirties the harmony to create a marvelous shimmer of sound. This event corresponds to the entrance of the solo horn with a new pitch, a sounding A♭ produced as the seventh harmonic on the B♭ horn, and a new sound since it is produced using the B♭ valve on the double horn. The cluster continues to expand as the solo horn ascends through the tenth and eleventh harmonics to reach the twelfth harmonic, a sounding f''. The ensemble horns and natural tunings are replaced at this point by strings, supported by the trombone, and using just tunings, to produce an open b♭ chord without a third. The entire passage is a remarkable study in pitch and timbre achieved through conflicting tuning systems and horns of different lengths. Of course, the concerto, which consists of seven movements conceived as sketches that explore a wide range of musical styles and compositional techniques, demonstrates other imaginative and innovative approaches to the horn, but this brief passage serves to demonstrate the potential of the natural horn in modern compositional practice, not just on the instrument itself, but also the application of natural horn practices to the valve horn. The Natural Horn Revived When Benjamin Britten wrote the Serenade in 1944, the natural horn was very much an anomaly. Not since Paul Dukas’s Villanelle of 1906 and the orchestral version of Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte of 1910 had composers written for the natural horn, and it would be still another three decades before composers would write for the instrument again.27 This might explain why the natural tunings were so widely misunderstood at the time, but it also suggests how far into obscurity the instrument and its distinctive features had fallen. Even as the natural horn and its techniques began to appear in new compositions in the 1970s, they were typically isolated in solo passages or in pieces for horn alone where the natural tunings, if they appeared, would not clash with other instruments. The natural horn’s re-establishment as an ensemble instrument in the 1980s marks its revival as a viable instrument in modern composition. As in the nineteenth century, there is once again a small but growing number of specialists who have acquired the skills and advanced techniques specific to the natural horn. This has led to a growing body of works applying new compositional practices in modern styles. This is apparent in Baumann’s application of extended techniques, Dove’s approach to melodic writing for the instrument, and Ligeti’s exploration of natural tunings and horns crooked in different keys. The natural horn may not ever achieve the central position it held during the golden age of the horn that lasted from Mozart through Brahms, but the growing body of innovative and imaginative new works suggests that the instrument has, once again, established a firm place in new music composition and facilitated some of the most exciting new works of the last half century.

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  129 Appendix   ​ Table 8.1 Chronological List of Modern Works for Natural Horn Composer

Musical Work

Instrumentation

Date

Paul Dukas

Villanelle

1905

Maurice Ravel

Pavane pour une infante défunte (orchestration of a piano work from 1899) Corps a corps Psalm of Faith in the Wilderness Kaleidoskop Elegia Concerto (“A Romantic Concerto”) Four Pieces Sonata Ballade Moment Musical Thoughtful Wanderings Basler Romanze The Dying Deer Brevi Loquens Panachida Three Pieces Het Valkhof Figures in the Garden Albanian Nights Concerto in E♭ (“Son of Horn Concerto”) Dances Quartet

Horn (natural horn and valve horn) and piano Orchestra with natural horns Natural horn Full chorus and natural horn

1977 1982

Natural horn Natural horn Natural horn and orchestra

1983 1984 1984

Natural horn Natural horn and piano Natural horn Natural horn Natural horn and percussion Four natural horns Natural horn Natural horn Natural horn Natural horn and piano Natural horn Wind octet Wind octet Natural horn and orchestra

1985 1985 1987 1987 1988–90 1989 1989 1989 1989 1989 1991 1991 1991 1992

Marc Bleuse Robert Patterson Hans Georg Pflüger Hermann Baumann James Collorafi Robert G. Patterson James Collorafi Vitali Bujanovski Bernhard Krol Douglas Hill Bernhard Krol Alun Francis Vincent Grüger James Nicholas Christopher Wiggins Lowell Greer Jonathan Dove Nigel Osborne James Nicholas Randall E. Faust Robert G. Patterson

Natural horn and percussion Natural horn, violin, viola, and violoncello Vladimir Djambazov LóvenCóren Natural horn James Nicholas Sonata No. 2 (“Exile”) Natural horn and piano Jean-Luc Darbellay Natural horn Spectrum Jonathan Dove Fortepiano, two natural horns, An Airmail Letter from string quartet, and bass Mozart Jean-Luc Darbellay Two valve horns or two Signal natural horns James Nicholas Two natural horns Twelve Pieces Jeffrey Snedeker Natural horn Goodbye to a Friend Peter Maxwell Davies The Jacobite Rising Chorus and orchestra (with natural horns) James Nicholas Sonata No. 3 (“Searching”) Natural horn and piano Jeffrey Snedeker Natural horn Two Solo Etudes

1910

1992 1992 1993 1993 1993 1993 1995 1995 1996 1997 1997 1997 (Continued)

130  J. Drew Stephen

Table 8.1  (Continued) Composer

Musical Work

Instrumentation

Jean-Luc Darbellay

Call

György Ligeti

Hamburgisches Konzert

James Nicholas Jeffrey Agrell Jean-Luc Darbellay Thomas Hundemer

Sonata No. 4 (“The Ranks of the Fiery Spirit”) September Elegy Espaces magiques Gently Weep

Two valve horns, two natural 1998 horns, piano Solo horn (valve horn, 1998/99 natural horn) and chamber orchestra (with four obligato natural horns) Natural horn and piano 1999

Randall Faust

Declamation

Heinz Holliger Michel Roth Salvador Brotons

Induuchlen Töne oder Tiere Horn Concerto (“A♭ origine”)

Salvador Brotons Eve Beglarian Jay Batzner

A♭ origine Einhorn Supernatural

Jean-Luc Darbellay

Trittico

Chet Udell

Gjallarhorn

Douglas Hill Jeffrey Snedeker Pip Eastop Jean-Luc Darbellay

Three Solo Pieces Dreams of the Casbah Set the Wild Echoes Flying Dialogo

John Croft Juhani Nuorvala Jeremy Thurlow

Nocturne Toivo Crooked Consort

Olli Virtaperko

Moiré

Nicholas Korth

Midnight Rain

Nicholas Korth

Inscapes

Timo Andres

Loud Ciphers

Natural horn and piano Natural horn and piano Natural horn with digital audio delay Horn (natural horn, valve horn) and harpsichord Countertenor and natural horn Natural horn Solo horn (hora gai, alphorn, natural horn, valve horn) and orchestra Natural horn Natural horn and electronics Natural horn and live electronics Solo horn (alphorn, natural horn, valve horn) and orchestra eMersion-enabled natural horn and electronics Alphorn or natural horn Natural horn Natural horn Violin horn (alphorn, natural horn, valve horn) and ensemble Natural horn Natural Horn and Soundtrack Natural horn and string quartet Solo natural horn and Baroque orchestra (with orchestral natural horn obligato) Tenor, natural horn, string quartet, keyboard Tenor, natural horn, and string orchestra Four natural horns

Date

2001 2001 2004 2004 2004 2006 2009 2011 2011 2012–2013 2014 2015 2016 2016 2016 2018 2018 2018 2019 2020

2020 2020 2022

F

F

C

3 G

F

4 C A

5 E C

6 G E♭

7 B♭ F

8 C G

9 D A

10 E B♭

11 F C

12 G

14 B♭ E♭

13 A D

E

15 B

F

16 C

466.16 523.25 587.33 622.25 659.26 698.46 462.33 520.58 586.17 619.33 660.56 693.80

261.63 311.13 349.23 392.00 440 260.29 309.66 346.90 390.61 440

43.65 87.31 130.81 174.61 220

43.36 86.72 130.14 173.45 220

43.65 87.31 130.96 174.61 218.27 261.92 305.57 349.23 392.88 436.56 480.19 523.84 567.50 611.15 654.80 698.46

2 C

1 C

Note: Pitches are indicated in cents for the Horn in F at the pitch standard of A = 440 Hz. The Meantone tunings refer to D’Alembert’s Modified Meantone Temperament of 1752. The human ear can generally perceive pitch differences of as little as 1–2 cents.

Partial Notated Pitch Sounding Pitch Natural Tuning Equal Temp. Meantone

Table 8.2 A Comparison of the Natural Tuning of the Harmonic Series to Other Standard Systems of Tuning

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  131

132  J. Drew Stephen Table 8.3 Selected Works for Valve Horn Using Natural Horn Tunings Composer

Musical Work

Instrumentation

Date

Benjamin Britten Olivier Messiaen Randall Faust Francis Orval Henri Pousseur György Ligeti

“Prologue” and “Epilogue” from Serenade “appel interstellaire” from Des canyons aux étoiles… Prelude Libre-free-frei Naturel Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano

Tenor, valve horn, and string orchestra Valve horn

1944

1974 1981 1981 1982

Peter Lawrence Edit Lejet Randall Faust Régis Campo

“Interlude” from In Concert Deux soliloques Harmonielehre Marines

Valve horn Valve horn Valve horn Violin, valve horn, and piano Valve horn Valve horn Valve horn Valve horn

1971–1974

1988 1993 1996 2006

Notes 1 See, for example, the third and fourth symphonies of Robert Schumann (1850 and 1851) or the third symphony of Camille Saint-Saëns (1886), all of which call for a pair of valve horns and a pair of natural horns. 2 For a detailed account of this process, see Jeffrey Leighton Snedeker, Horn Teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, 1792 to 1903: The Transition from Natural Horn to Valved Horn, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021). 3 Louis-François Dauprat, Partition des trios, quatuors & sextuors pour cors en différens tons (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1815), 2–3. “Il est maintenant à propos de rappeler aux observateurs, ce qu’ils ont dû remarquer, et aux compositeurs ce qu’ils doivent savoir, que chaque Ton du Cor a un timbre ou qualité de Son qui lui est particulier, et qui se fait sentir entre les deux Tons les plus rapprochés, comme Re et Mi ♭, Mi ♮, et Fa etc. Par conséquent, si la différence de timbre est sensible à cette faible distance, combien ne le sera-t’-elle pas entre deux Tons plus éloignés, tels que Sol et Ut, ou Re et La. [I]l semble alors que ce soit deux Instruments différens; l’un plein de force et d’éclat, l’autre de gravité et de douceur.” 4 S. n., New Instructions for the French Horn (London: Longman and Broderip, [c. 1780]), 4. 5 “Das Adagio scheint mir (wenigstens in der ersten Hälfte) eine Sonderung beyder Instrumentarten darzustellen, wobey die Blasinstrumente in tiefer Wehmuth athmen und besonders das Horn einen äusserst melancholischen Ruf ertönen lässt, so dass Alles sich nur in stillweinender Klage zu vereinigen scheint.” Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, “Nachrichten,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 26 (1825): 446. English translation in W. F. H. Blandford, “Studies on the Horn: III. The Fourth Horn in the ‘Choral Symphony,’” Musical Times 66 (1925): 129. 6 “Zu beklagen ist es aber, dass der schöne, edle und duftige Klang des Waldhorns mit Einführung des Ventilhorns aus unseren Orchestern fast ganz verschwunden ist, denn nur wenige Hornisten halten es noch der Mühe Werth, zu älteren Werken und überhaupt in solchen, die für einfaches Horn berechnet sind, ein solches zu nehmen. Die meisten Bläser führen Alles auf dem Ventilhorn aus, ja nur zu oft transponiren sie alle und jede Horn stimme auf dem Ventilhorn in F, wahrscheinlich um sich die Mühe des Umsteckens der Stimmungsbögen zu ersparen! Bei Compositionen, die für das Ventilhorn gedacht und geschrieben sind, die auf dem Naturhorn deshalb und ausführbar wären, ist das-

A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance  133 selbe natürlich an seinem Platze, es aber in Beethoven’schen und Weber’schen Werken zu gebrauchen, ist ein Vandalismus.” Ferdinand Gleich, Handbuch der modernen Instrumentierung (Leipzig: F. C. Kant, 1866), 41. 7 Reginald Morley-Pegge, “The Evolution of the Modern French Horn from 1750 to the Present Day,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 69 (1942): 54. 8 Dennis Brain, horn, and Denis Matthews, piano, Beethoven Horn Sonata. Anvil Film and Recording Group, 1953. https://youtu​.be​/mlKJ9CjSv_U (accessed March 29, 2022). 9 Although Britten notated the thirteenth harmonic in bar 10, he clearly expected the performer to produce the fourteenth harmonic, which lies between a'' and b♭''. See Jonathan Penny, “The Brain of Britten: Notational Aspects of the Serenade,” The Horn Call 43, no. 1 (2012): 69–70. 10 Penny, “The Brain of Britten,” 70–71. 11 Stephen J. Pettitt, Dennis Brain: A Biography (London: Hale, 1976), 71. 12 Eric Thompson, “Record Guide,” Tempo 33 (Autumn 1954): 39–40. 13 Benjamin Britten, “[Letter from Benjamin Britten],” Tempo 34 (Winter 1954–1955): 39. 14 Kristen Thelander, “György Ligeti’s ‘Trio,’” The Horn Call 30, no. 1 (1999): 43–46. 15 The International Competition for Hand Horn, Bad Harzburg, West Germany, was held in 1984, 1987, 1990, and 1993; the American Horn Competition included a natural horn division in 1978, 1979, 1981, 1985, 1989, and 1991. For more on the Bad Harzburg competition see Lowell Greer, “Third International Horn Competition,” Historic Brass Society Journal 2 (1990): 210–211; Hella Baumann, “Second International Competition for Hand Horn, Bad Harzburg, West Germany, June 17–20, 1987,” The Horn Call 18, no. 1 (1987): 19–20. On the American Horn Competition, see Steve Gross, “A Competition Comes of Age,” The Horn Call 18, no. 2 (1987–1988): 25–30; Richard Seraphinoff, “American Horn Competition,” Historic Brass Society Journal 3 (1991): 270. 16 Baumann, “Second International Competition for Hand Horn,” 19. 17 Pip Eastop, program note for Set the Wild Echoes Flying, published online on the Three Worlds Records Website, https://three​-worlds​-records​.com​/playlist​/set​-the​-wild​-echoes​ -flying/ (accessed January 5, 2022). 18 The other commissioned works include Nigel Osborne’s Albanian Nights, Jonathan Harvey’s Serenade in Homage to Mozart, Stephen Olivier’s Character Pieces for Wind Octet, and Robert Saxton’s Paraphrase on Mozart’s “Idomeneo.” The works by Dove and Osborne were written for period instruments and premiered by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The remaining works were written for modern instruments and premiered by the London Philharmonic Winds. 19 Jonathan Dove, “Programme Notes,” https://www​.fabermusic​.com​/music​/figures​-in​-the​ -garden​-2270 (accessed January 5, 2022). 20 Dove’s comments are from a personal discussion with the author on November 30, 2021. 21 György Ligeti, liner notes to The Ligeti Project IV: Hamburg Concerto, Double Concerto, Ramifications, Requiem (Teldec Classics 8573-88263-2, 2003). 22 György Ligeti, Hamburgisches Konzert für Horn solo und Kammerorchester (Mainz: Schott, 2004), 1. 23 The pitch measurements are indicated as a performance note in the score. Ligeti does not mention the tenth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth harmonics in the performance notes, but he does identify them by harmonic and with the appropriate arrow when they appear in the music. 24 See Mike Searby, “To the Future of the Past? Ligeti’s Stylistic Eclecticism in His Hamburg Concerto,” Contemporary Music Review 31, nos. 2–3 (2012): 241. 25 György Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation with Péter Várnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel, and Himself (London: Eulenburg Books, 1983), 53. 26 The fourth horn in E♭, playing a written c'' (eighth harmonic) and the second horn in F, playing a written b♭' (seventh harmonic) both produce a sounding e♭, but the e♭ produced by the second horn is 30% lower due to the use of the seventh harmonic.

134  J. Drew Stephen 27 Dukas’s Villanelle was written as a morceau de concours for the 1906 exam at the Paris Conservatoire and scored so the beginning portion is realized on the natural horn and the concluding section on the valve horn with an extended passage for piano, allowing time for the performer to change instruments. Ravel’s Pavane is scored for a pair of Cors simples en sol (natural horns in G) to convey the poignantly innocent mood of the composition. Both pieces suggest that natural horn practices persisted for some years even after the instrument was no longer taught at the Conservatoire, but they are rarities.

9

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021) Rebecca Cypess

In 2021, composer Molly Herron released a recording of new compositions titled Through Lines: New Music for Viola da Gamba Consort on the New Amsterdam label in collaboration with the viol consort Science Ficta, a trio consisting of Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Loren Ludwig, and Zoe Weiss. Herron, an amateur viol player herself, describes the instrument as an essential aspect of her compositional voice. Its unique timbral palette, its physical properties, the playing techniques that it calls for, its beauties, and its quirks all contribute to the ways in which Herron generates ideas and locates creative constraints that help her develop those ideas. Some of the pieces on Through Lines started as Herron’s own improvisations on the instrument, and the album as a whole explores what Herron loves about the viol. I spoke to Herron in August 2021, after hearing Through Lines, with a view to understanding how she approached composition for viol consort. Why write for viol? Why for a consort, rather than a soloist? What role does the history of the viol consort play in Herron’s thought and creative process? As I read over the transcript of our interview, one of Herron’s comments—seemingly unrelated to the question of her own approach as a composer—stood out. While enrolled as a doctoral student in composition at Princeton University, Herron studied viol with Sarah Cunningham, one of the leading viol players in the world today. As Herron explained, I studied viol with Sarah Cunningham most recently at Princeton. We were talking about interpreting [a] piece—and that consort dynamic—and she said to me that she carries with her every person she’s ever played a certain piece with. In the way she plays the piece, she carries a little bit of every group of people she’s had the chance to play that piece with, which I think is so beautiful. And then that compounds over generations and you think about the community of musicians—an unbroken line of people stretching back, in the case of Renaissance and Baroque music, hundreds of years, and this dynamic that’s passed on in each different configuration. That’s what music is to me. That’s what it’s about.1 This comment, seemingly unconnected to the topic of Herron’s own compositional style and process, in fact offers an important avenue for exploring her work in Through Lines. In composing for viol consort, Herron surrounds herself not just DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-12

136  Rebecca Cypess with memories of her own experiences with the viol—whether embodied, intellectual, emotional, or all of these—but also, deliberately, with the musical technologies of generations past. Herron has consciously adopted an understanding of musical instruments as technologies, exploring this topic at length in her Princeton dissertation.2 The technologies of the viol, the physical habits of performance that the instrument demands and builds in players, and the embodied memory that it creates serve as vehicles for creating a community that spans generations. Consciously in dialogue with composers such as Picforth (the composer’s first name is unknown) and Marin Marais, Herron seems to conjure their presence as part of her compositional process, keeping them alive through her own interactions with the viol. The technology of the viol serves Herron as a means of creating community. In this chapter, I will offer an interpretation of Herron’s Through Lines that places this work in the context of current theoretical understandings of musical instrument technologies, engaging especially with the conception of musical instruments as vehicles of discovery and the creation of knowledge that arose in the early modern era. I will then explore the idea of instrument technology as a mediator across generations. Throughout, I will quote liberally from the interview that I conducted with Herron to document her understanding of her relationship with the viol, with the consort medium, and with the community—past and present—that she seeks to create. Constraint and Possibility: Composing at the Instrument Early reviewers of Through Lines, many of whom are not generally engaged with the world of historically informed performance, often noted the distance between the viol consort and the general new music community. Critic Bill Brownlee asked, “What’s a viola da gamba? I scarcely know. Yet I’m absolutely gobsmacked by the sounds created by trios and quartets of the instrument on Through Lines … Clearly, it’s a divine manifestation of modern-day sorcery.”3 John Schaefer, host of the National Public Radio program New Sounds, sought to introduce his listeners to the viol by saying that it “looks and sounds like a cello and pre-dates J. S. Bach.”4 Herron herself noted this tendency to compare the viol to the cello, but she finds the comparison inadequate, because the timbral ranges of the two instruments are so vastly different: One of the things people say so frequently, and I’ve said it myself, because it’s expedient: “It’s kind of like the cello.” It looks kind of like the cello. It sounds kind of like the cello. But one of the things I love so much about the viol is I think it’s got this timbral palette that leaves the violin family in the dust. It’s just so broad and expressive and amazing. That’s probably the primary reason why I fell in love with this instrument—the primary reason I had so much to say on it for this album. In our interview, Herron dwelled at length on the issue of timbre and indicated that this element of performance and composition is a primary generative force in her compositional process:

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)  137 When an idea comes to me for writing a piece, it’s usually not a melodic idea. It’s usually not a rhythmic idea, though sometimes things originate there. But it tends to be something that has a feel, some kind of world that I want to create and be sitting in, and that, for me, is timbre—you know, the warmth or the icy cold of harmonics—and it’s also often some kind of energy or gesture. Those are the two things together that will start things off for me. Timbre is not merely a product of abstract creative conception, but one rooted in the physical properties and performance techniques of the instrument. In this respect, discussions of timbre reflect the broader “material turn” in musical thought, and in the humanities as a whole, in recent years. As Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding have pointed out, the founders of the field of musicology in nineteenth-century Germany effectively ignored timbre, focusing instead on elements of music, such as pitch and rhythm, that were more easily quantified. As Dolan and Rehding note, positing the importance of timbre for a particular genre or tradition has been a shorthand for saying: “this music—contemporary music, popular music, music from traditions outside of Western art music—has a different value system from the works that have traditionally occupied musicology.”5 Thus, although Herron is working with a Western instrument (the viol) and a configuration of those instruments familiar from the Western tradition (the consort), Through Lines represents a deviation from “classical” compositional technique. Herron’s attention to the physical object of the viol and the sounds that it elicits indicates that her approach has a great deal in common with contemporary electronic music, folk music, and other genres and styles that stand outside the Western canon. Herron observed that the aspects of viol performance that interest her the most are often those that cannot be notated clearly in conventional Western staff notation. She cited the composer and fiddler Cleek Schrey, whom she interviewed as part of her dissertation research, and whose work in fiddle music informs this understanding. As Herron explained, There are these artifacts of scratchiness or fingerboard sound or different tuning spaces that people go into that are often counted out by people who are transcribing that music or studying that music from other places. But for him, and for many people in that tradition, they’re not artifacts of not being able to play your instrument properly; they’re desired, cultivated sounds. These sounds, which Herron went on to call “fringe artifacts” and “liminal places” on the instrument, result from a sense of exploration. For Herron, they represent “digging deep and finding things in your instrument that people haven’t found before and staying in places on the instrument that other people haven’t stayed before.” She described the attention to these “fringe artifacts” as a product of folk traditions as well as modernist composition:

138  Rebecca Cypess One of the gifts of the modernists was “Let’s try to explore everything about this instrument. Let’s not treat it like something that was passed down to us with some set of rules. Let’s explore.” That, for me—starting to look at instruments more as objects that can make sound and that are there to be explored—was a real eye-opener. I owe that experience to working with instrument builders and working with brand-new instruments, where we’re together saying “What does this do? What are the potentials with those instruments?” And then, having that perspective, turning back to the old standards that I was so familiar with for so long, and trying to keep that perspective— that was a real shift in the way I wrote. Although she attributes her sense of exploration at the instrument to modernist influences, Herron recognizes the precedent for this approach in the work of early modern composers and performers. This understanding resonates with my own research on Italian composers of the early seventeenth century, who came to see instruments as vehicles of open-ended inquiry. As I have argued elsewhere, early instrumental composers such as Biagio Marini and Girolamo Frescobaldi embedded their physical habits at their instruments within their compositions, notating passages that appear to be the direct result of their physical habits in their “finished” compositions. In this respect, their work mirrored that of natural philosophers of the early modern era, who used their scientific instruments to explore new possibilities and to create new knowledge.6 Similarly, Tom Beghin has noted the extent to which compositions by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were intimately connected to the instrument technologies available to them. In this sense, Beghin’s work undermines the notion, established by those nineteenth-century musicologists whom Dolan and Rehding cite, that the “genius” of these composers was not historically contingent or dependent on their physical or technological worlds.7 This approach might be understood to conflict with—or at least productively question—the view of composer/technologist Andrew McPherson, inventor of the Magnetic Resonator Piano, which functions as an extension of a modern piano. When asked by Dolan “what made a good new instrument,” McPherson responded, “I think a good instrument is one that can become transparent—because it lets the performer forget about the thing they are manipulating, and think about the music they want to make.”8 For Herron, it seems, the “thing she is manipulating” is something that she wants to maintain at the forefront of her mind and her creative process. Her music cannot exist in the abstract but is innately tied to the instrument. For Herron, the unique nature of the viol offers a path to innovation as well as a set of creative constraints that shape her compositional style. By composing at and for the instrument, Herron can use her technical skill and her muscle memory as a performer to generate material. In explaining this approach, she invoked the pianist and improviser Keith Jarrett, whose Köln Concert was famously hindered—but ultimately enabled—by a faulty piano. In Herron’s understanding, the creative inspiration for Jarrett’s performance in that now-iconic concert came from the navigation of the technology in front of him. While a local piano tuner managed

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)  139 to bring the instrument into something close to working order, the constraints that it continued to impose—which notes could be played, and how—shaped Jarrett’s improvisation that night.9 In pieces that encode the physical habits of the composer at their instrument, the instrument becomes an extension of the human body. In her approach to the viol, Herron noted, a lot of the sound of the mechanism of the string instrument does feel like it comes from your body, toggling over from one string to the next, feeling the weight of your bow shift and the pressure of your arm shift—that does feel more connected to us.10 Here, too, Herron’s understanding reflects the experience of a composer-performer who derives musical ideas through the productive interaction with her instrument. As she explained, many of her compositions in Through Lines originated as improvisations: They were improvisations I did on my viol. And I do this all the time: I’ll sit down with my viol and I’ll take my phone and hit “record,” and just mess around and see what happens. Both “Hammer and Pull” and “Lyra” came out that way. I more or less transcribed them from what I had improvised. Of course, things got altered along the way. And in the transcription process, I broke them out to multiple instruments. As this passage suggests, knowledge of the instrument and the techniques required to play it had a formative effect on Through Lines; in this respect, too, this set of compositions evokes the historical practices of composer-performers who encode their own physical habitus in their works. Yet, significantly, she used a completely modern technology—the recording app on her phone—to capture moments of improvisation that only later made their way into the notated score. This new technology thus facilitated a nearly direct line of transmission from the moment of exploratory improvisation to the finished work. Herron’s prior experience with newly invented instruments informs this approach, in that it helped her to hone her sense of what it meant to make music that was idiomatic to an instrument. She had worked previously with the instrument designer and builder Andy Cavatorta, whose eight-foot-tall “Dervishes” are comprised of 14 tubes of various lengths, all tuned to specific pitches and robotically controlled to spin at precise speeds to generate pitches. Herron’s composition Stellar Atmospheres (2015), scored for female voices, viol consort, and Dervishes, takes advantage of the unique properties of this newly invented instrument. This collaboration was ideal, Herron noted, since she, too, is most interested in music for acoustic instruments, rather than electronic ones. And yet, she told me, working with newly invented instruments poses problems: “I’m not sure how much of that there’s going to be in my future because it’s just so labor-intensive to work with these things.”

140  Rebecca Cypess Compositional Style and the Creation of Community In discussing her own compositional style in Through Lines, Herron emphasized the importance of community in her approach. Although pieces like “Lyra” and “Hammer and Pull” began as solo improvisations, their ultimate scoring for a consort was essential. She explained that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she turned to solo composition because commissions were coming in from performers who wanted to be able to create music in solitude. However, this is not the kind of composition that she prefers: “The thing that really excites me about music is the interaction between sounds.” In this part of our interview, Herron seemed to be looking for the best way to describe the sense of community that she derives from writing for viol consort: “It’s hard for me to articulate for myself why I don’t like writing solo music. It’s always just immediately more informed, more interesting for me if I’ve got another voice in the mix.” However, if she had simply been looking for “the interaction between sounds” or “another voice,” she might have been satisfied with writing for solo viol: “you get that to some extent on instruments like the viola da gamba, which is chordal,” even in its solo manifestation. More than simply a way of bringing sounds into relation with one another, Herron’s work in the consort medium seems designed to foster a sense of community through music. I see this sense of community as consisting of two aspects: one synchronic and one diachronic. The synchronic sense of community refers to her own experience playing in consorts, her desire to create a similar dynamic in the consort for which she is writing, and the way in which her music responds to the particular profiles of those performers. At the same time, Herron fosters a diachronic community by using the technology of the viol as a way of creating connections with past generations of composers and performers. Technology itself becomes a medium for community. An example of Herron’s synchronic community emerges from the composition “Lyra.” In discussing this piece, Herron noted that it could have been written for a solo viol: “there’s so little that the other instruments are doing; they’re just providing a sound bed that the soloist sits on.” Nevertheless, the use of the consort medium was essential: it’s an interactive sound bed. It gives you a greater sense of the depth of the pitches. It gives you a greater sense of the world that the soloist is living in—that the sound is living in. The music is so much richer for me in that kind of context. The layout of sound space in the recording is another important factor in “Lyra” and other compositions. Herron calls this configuration of sound space the “stereo field,” where you can have sounds coming from different places and interacting with each other from different parts of the stereo field. That’s another thing that inspires me as a composer—there was just something that piques my interest, and it’s a lot more interesting to me if you’ve got two sounds crashing

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)  141 into each other from two places than if everything’s coming from one central location. It is true that “Lyra” began as a solo improvisation on Herron’s phone—a medium that lacks the “stereo field”; nevertheless, her conception of the piece as a work for consort meant that the stereo field quickly came to play a significant role in its conception. This stereophonic ideal was especially important since Herron created Through Lines primarily with a studio recording in mind. The same approach appears in another of Herron’s works, the second movement of her Three Sarabandes (2019). As Herron explained, This is a modern string quartet that is really strongly inspired by Marais, and basically the cellist is playing a solo viol piece. But the rest of the ensemble is there, again, kind of playing droney pitches that are interacting. And I wouldn’t have wanted it to be just a solo piece, even though you could totally rip that cello part out of the context and play it on its own, and nobody would know the difference. But I don’t think I could have written it if the other people weren’t there. In both Through Lines and Three Sarabandes, the sonic qualities afforded by the medium of the consort contribute to the sense of human community that accumulates through that medium. Another layer of this sense of community emerges from her collaboration with Science Ficta. As she explained, Hopefully I’m writing a piece that can be performed by a different ensemble down the road. But, definitely, with this album, I’m thinking about who’s going to be playing each line and what their strengths and weaknesses are. And I know how they interact with each other. And I know what the dynamic is like in the ensemble. One thing I love about consort music is being in that space and having that interaction. If the element of synchronic community in Herron’s work seems to apply to many forms of chamber music and even large ensembles, her diachronic community is, I argue, more distinctive. Here I return to the passage quoted at the outset of this chapter, in which Herron quoted her viol teacher, Sarah Cunningham. Cunningham views the dynamic of the consort as one that keeps alive all her past experiences with other musicians; all these experiences are centered around consort music and the instrument itself. As Herron noted, this consort dynamic places her in “an unbroken line of people stretching back … hundreds of years.” It was at the moment of recalling Cunningham’s words that Herron articulated that the “interaction between sounds” was insufficient on its own. Rather, it was the sense of community—one developed not just in the present moment but rather accumulated over generations—that defined the consort experience. For Herron, composition for viol consort allowed her access to this community even as she sought to say something new through the medium. The instrument itself, as well

142  Rebecca Cypess as its situation within the consort dynamic, is a doorway to community. Through composition for viol consort, the instrument technology connects her with a community of musicians both past and present: “That’s what music is to me. That’s what it’s about.” Working with performers such as the members of Science Ficta can enhance this sense of community, but also nuance and inflect it, in that they create their own interpretations of new music, sometimes without the input of the composer. As Herron noted, I love the idea of people interpreting my music differently than I intended. Sometimes it’s really frustrating—like no, that’s wrong, don’t play it like that. But usually, I will say, if someone’s really put effort into it, if someone’s really thinking about it, then something good has come of it. And yet, she recognizes the need for the composer to cede control over the composition: There’s a time when the best performers of modern music say [to the composer], ok, get out of the room. Now it’s not your piece, it’s our piece; we’re the ones who are going to be up there on the stage, communicating to the audience. In part, Herron attributed the skill of Science Ficta in interpreting her compositions to the group members’ background in early music: One of the things that frustrates me about modern music making is that there’s often over-reliance by performers on what’s on the page. And there’s this pressure to write super-specific notation. There are beautiful examples out there—I think of David Lang in particular, who writes very spare scores, and people really step up and interpret them, and know what to do … One of the things I really love about working with early music performers is that they are so used to filling in gaps and interpreting and creating their own. They really feel like they own the piece. The physical technology of the instrument and the performance practices that it calls forth through its idiomatic properties further the sense of community that can be created through music. In this respect, Herron’s new music for early instruments is not just a response to historical music, but a way of creating a sense of community through time—what I am calling a “diachronic community.” The quirks of the viol are an important part of this phenomenon. Herron wonders whether the viol composers of early modern Europe would have embraced the instrument’s “fringe artifacts,” as she has done: “I wonder about this also, with those old Baroque performers and composers. I wonder how much they valued that space and stayed in that space.” In some cases, it is clear from the notated evidence that early composers would indeed have appreciated the same “fringe artifacts” that Herron does:

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)  143 Sometimes I stay in fringe artifacts that those old Baroque composers would not have been super into. And sometimes I stay in the places that they really like. “Roll,” for instance—it’s all about those big, resonant rolled chords. And that is, of course, something they would have reveled in. In other cases, however, a lack of notated evidence—brought about because conventional Western notation does not have a clear way of notating timbre and other effects—means that Herron is less sure of whether historical composers would have appreciated the viol’s fringe artifacts, as she does. Her composition “After Picforth,” based on a work by the composer Picforth in the sixteenth-century manuscript British Library Add. MS 31390, brings this question to the fore. As she explained, “There’s a lot in [‘After Picforth’] of what I call ‘the scurry’—when a gamba plays a rapid series of notes on the instrument, there’s this kind of scratchy sound.” This was one of the last pieces in the set that Herron composed, and it came out of her desire to portray the instrument in its fullness. While the work by Picforth in the British Library manuscript may not have much of the scurry in it, the scurry seems to emerge by necessity in other pieces for viols—for example, in the In Nomine “Crye,” by Christopher Tye, found in the same manuscript. I was thinking about what I love about the viol and what I wanted to focus on in these pieces. And I had a moment where I was like, you know, I don’t have the scurry on this album yet. I really love that about the viol, and I want the scurry in there. Yet Herron questioned whether historical viol composers and performers would have appreciated “the scurry” or sought to minimize it in performance: Would Marais have loved that? Would he have wanted it to be more clear and pitchy? … I mean, there’s just so much we don’t know about the timbral language and preferences of these early performers and composers. We don’t know what they were looking for, in the performance of their pieces, to be highlighted or suppressed. But I think we can conjecture based on the construction of the instruments. This statement, too, suggests that Herron sees the instrument itself as an object that places her into dialogue with composers and performers from the past; indeed, the presence of both Tye and Picforth in the British Library manuscript suggests that historical viol players of the sixteenth century already understood these two composers as part of the same community, linked by their interest in the viol and its sonic capacities. The technology of the instrument facilitates diachronic community. Moreover, synchronic and diachronic community merge in the capacities of the instrument. Herron reflected on the shifts from one timbral world to another as representing a creative journey that cannot be accomplished on the cello: “You can move from a harmonic into a solid note—and have a journey in that, you know, however long it takes you to get there, where it’s a microsecond or a minute, you have this incredible

144  Rebecca Cypess journey.” This comment may be equally applicable to a single performance on the viol and to the way in which Herron’s compositions bridge the divide—or create “through lines”—between modern and early styles. In exploring the timbres and unique physical techniques required to play this instrument, Herron calls up associations with the past that can be understood as effecting a “journey” through time. Conclusion The notion that technology might form a means to creating community is that one Herron put forth herself: Each person who’s performing this music is surrounded by a community of technology. So the technology that was surrounding a person who lived in 1750 is very different from the technology that’s surrounding a person in 2021. There’s this connection of understanding what the community surrounding the original music was. And then there’s also this knowledge of electronic music and computers, and whatever else we have that influences the way we think about sound and what’s possible for humans. That’s a huge transformation. Herron’s awareness of technological ecology as a key to her music making is one of the factors that led to my interest in her work. In devising a title for this chapter, I vacillated between the phrases “Technology and Community” and “Technology as Community.” Ultimately, I settled upon the imperfect compromise “Technology and/as Community.” I do not mean to imply that the technology of the viol can stand in for the community of people who make Herron’s music come alive. Indeed, Herron has emphasized that playing alone— even given the capacities of the viol to play polyphonically—does not really interest her. What I hope to say, instead, is that Herron’s conception of her instrument as a piece of technology serves to enhance her sense of community with other people. The viol mediates between Herron and her collaborators in Science Ficta, and it also links her to other viol players who play her music but whom she has never—and may never—meet. More, the long history of her instrument connects her through time to composers and performers past. In this sense, it may be worth revisiting the astonished reaction of reviewer Bill Brownlee, who suggested that Herron’s music is “a divine manifestation of modern-day sorcery.” In fact, through her diachronic community, Herron may be thought of as conjuring voices from the past. In her characteristically understated way, at the close of our interview, Herron reflected once more on the themes we had discussed: “Technology and community—these are big, big things on my mind most of the time.” Notes 1 Molly Herron, interview with the author, August 25, 2021. Throughout this chapter, quotations from Herron are from this interview unless otherwise noted. A recording of

Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021)  145 this work is in Molly Herron and Science Ficta, Through Lines (Brooklyn, NY: New Amsterdam Records, 2021). A score is available through Herron’s website as Molly Herron, Through Lines (s.l.: Molly Herron, 2021). 2 Molly Herron, “Composing with Musical Instruments: Physicality and Instrument Intervention in the Creative Process” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2021). 3 Bill Brownlee, “Album Review: Molly Herron and Science Ficta—Through Lines,” September 9, 2021, https://www​.therestandstheglass​.com​/reviews​-and​-commentary​/ throughlines (accessed February 13, 2022). 4 John Schaefer, introduction to episode 4533 of New Sounds, interview with Molly Herron, https://www​.newsounds​.org​/story​/4533​-molly​-herron/ (accessed February 13, 2022). 5 Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding, “Timbre: Alternative Histories and Possible Futures for the Study of Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4. 6 Rebecca Cypess, Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 7 See, for example, Tom Beghin, The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), especially 77–126. A different conception, in which the imagination of sounds apparently preceded the invention of instruments that would make those sounds, is explored in Thomas Patteson, Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 8 Emily I. Dolan, “Portrait: Andrew McPherson and the Magnetic Resonator Piano,” Keyboard Perspectives 8 (2015): 173–184. 9 See Peter Elsdon, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), introduction, DOI:1​0.109​3/acp​rof:o​sobl/​97801​99779​253.0​03.00​08. 10 Compare Dolan, “Portrait: Andrew McPherson,” 184; see also Rebecca Cypess and Steven Kemper, “The Anthropomorphic Analogy: Humanising Musical Machines in the Early Modern and Contemporary Eras,” Organised Sound 23, no. 2 (2018): 167–180.

Part III

Case Studies



10 Feeding the Flexible Omnivore Collaborative Systems in A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling

In 2007 and 2009, respectively, two unconventional ensembles were born in Massachusetts: the 18-member, self-conducted string orchestra A Far Cry, and the eight-member vocal band Roomful of Teeth. Each was founded in a spirit of stylistic hyperflexibility, a commitment to creative process that transcended the finished product, and a collaborative, uniquely democratic take on both art and decision making. These ensembles have come to exemplify a reimagined approach to contemporary voice- and string-based music making in 2022. A Boston Globe review from a joint concert of the groups in 2017 focuses in on a specific image to describe the two: The conductorless string orchestra A Far Cry and vocal octet Roomful of Teeth approach music with open minds and appetites for adventure. Performances by these omnivorous musicians can and do incorporate anything. A Far Cry’s programs sometimes focus on a single composer, sometimes span a thousand years of music. Roomful of Teeth explores vocal techniques as diverse as Tuvan throat singing and death-metal howling.1 The idea of the “musical omnivore” takes center stage in this description. In the omnivore’s way of making music, drastically different styles are enthusiastically explored—often over the space of a single concert or album. The intention is to present something that is both broad and deep, interacting with each new style with the greatest possible level of specificity and care. This demands a lot from the musicians involved: focus, trust, virtuosity, careful listening, and no small amount of love. To be able to delve into the minute details of each individual work while also engaging in a more sweeping narrative, the musicians must develop a rich stylistic repertoire upon which they can continuously build. The key to the near impossibility of producing such work is a simple one: collaboration. In both ensembles, the musicians depend on each other fiercely, using this deep trust to create something which is greater than the sum of their parts. The wealth of collective memory, the thrill of collective risk taking, and the power of collective decision making seed a musical landscape that blooms with new possibilities. As co-authors and members of these ensembles, we’ve discovered that the “omnivorous” meal we are making is constantly changing according to DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-14

150  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling its ingredients, its methods of preparation, and certainly the audiences it hopes to feed, but its nourishing power remains. A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth have worked together several times, participating in “the sort of ecstatic music making that can spring from the close friendships between musicians,”2 and learning from each other—both about the similarities in their approach, and the key differences that arise as each strives to fulfill its mission. No matter the idiom, both groups are game to play and explore—a musical and structural feature that could not exist without trust. In this chapter, we will address several interrelated topics: explorations in stylistic variation (the “art” of our processes); writing and arranging for specific artists (the “humanity” of collaborative creation); and the democratized chamber ensemble (a study in structure). Drawing on interviews with key players of both ensembles, we will discuss the specific aesthetic, collaborative, and structural features that allow each group to embrace its omnivorous identity. Maintaining varied repertoire presents a special set of challenges that become opportunities over time. The deliberate work that allows a Baroque offering to sparkle with extemporized ornaments can be equally valuable when working on a freshly composed piece for the group that incorporates improvised elements. The very idea of “historically informed performance practice,” with its focus on questions of context, can illuminate any musical work, from any era, if approached with care and rigor. We learn as we go, remembering what works and discarding what doesn’t. All of this, for each group, becomes part of our collective craft. Mise en place: Origin Stories A Far Cry

The central feature of A Far Cry (hereafter AFC)—the one from which most other aspects flow—is the fact that group leadership is shared. Every member is an artistic director, responsible for leading certain works and creating concert programs, which are conceived by individuals and ratified by the group at large. As The New York Times puts it, “A Far Cry … brims with personality, or rather, personalities, many and varied.”3 How does this directorship express itself in performance? For every piece that AFC programs, there is a unique grouping of principal players that directs the work. Over the course of the concert, nearly every musician on stage will have some sort of leading role. One of the signature features of AFC is that as these principals rotate, the group sound shifts dynamically, as the tutti players re-orient themselves around the current set of leaders. This dramatic reshifting is a cornerstone of AFC’s variety of style, and it continuously encourages and requires flexibility. When AFC was first coming into being, recalls founding violinist Jesse Irons, these delicate structures were hardly the first thing on anyone’s mind. Asked “What do you think was lacking in the field when the group was founded?” his response was, “Well … jobs for all of us!”

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  151 I don’t know if I can say it was formed in response to existing structures or even their lack. I could imagine what was missing in the field, but I could be wrong because I wasn’t an expert—I was a kid, like we all were! We all just thought “Hey, what if we could all be in a big string quartet together, like an orchestra, but with the feel of a quartet.”4 The group’s beginnings were a mixture of casual activity and a shared, deliberate vision. A constellation of musicians who had been getting to know each other in various circumstances—previous institutions, summer festivals—descended on Boston for graduate school. Energy was high and so was the desire to play chamber music and form groups, so the players started meeting for “reading parties”— social gatherings that would give musicians a chance to get to know each other by sight-reading well-known works together. A reading party rarely has fixed roles for its musicians; it’s much more common for the assembled group to rotate as much as possible. The unspoken thinking is that rotation simply makes it more fun and energizing for everyone. That basic tenet has never changed for AFC, although an early vote was needed to confirm it. Founding violinist Megumi Lewis recalls: We consciously decided to fully rotate, even amongst those who felt less comfortable at the time, because we wanted everyone to have a chance to keep growing, even if it meant a few shakier performances at the beginning. And pretty soon, everyone wanted to lead!5 Over time, the group has learned how to incorporate rotation and collective leadership into more and more of its structures—from playing to programming to group decision making. The dividends from that approach became clearer over time, both in terms of the group’s own development and its professional trajectory. “As we began to come into ourselves,” recalls Irons, we were able to see which things were lacking in the industry because they were the spots we were able to inhabit. One advantage that developed after a few years was the simple vitality of the performances, because our model meant that we were always “on” and playing at full capacity. The second one that really helped us was when we switched to individual programming, because that unlocked everyone’s creative self—and more than that, it really affected the concertgoing experience in a way that was even more profound than how we perform.6 A final, crucial feature of AFC’s toolbox can be found in a set of program notes written by guest harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani for one of the group’s first concerts: The “soundtrack” to our lives is a rich and sometimes super-saturated mix of everything offered to us by the generous era of recorded sound: Bach, Haydn, Jethro Tull, Radiohead, Bob Marley, Edith Piaf, Monteverdi, and

152  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling maybe even bluegrass. We cannot pretend, even when we are playing earlier music by composers of other backgrounds, that we can completely forget our own experiences of sound. But if it is assumed that great music is great because its message is timeless and its content outweighs the forms or even the languages in which it is expressed, then we can say that we have conversed with Tchaikovsky, that we have sat and argued (fruitlessly, perhaps) with Händel, that we have had a joke or two with Quantz.7 From the beginning, affirms Esfahani, the group has had omnivorous ears—as everyone who lives in this “generous era of recorded sound” can. Although this extravagant selection of sound and style sometimes needs to be narrowed (in the interests of conversing authentically with each composer in turn), overall, the “super-saturated mix” automatically grants AFC’s musicians the opportunity and agency to move in many directions. Roomful of Teeth

The initial goal of Roomful of Teeth (hereafter RoT)—to employ highly trained musicians who are less likely to pursue a traditional operatic career, yet who express excitement about and passion to explore different vocal colors and textures—has held true, 13 years later. Co-artistic director Cameron Beauchamp describes the environment in which founding co-artistic director Brad Wells began to create RoT: In the ’60s and ’70s there was Philip Glass and Steve Reich groove new music. It had this chug to it, and that sort of got passed on to Alarm Will Sound (or similar). Vocally, there really hadn’t been anything like that since Tehillim, and while Meredith Monk certainly was continuing to stay the course, there wasn’t a vocal group that was taking on that tradition and forging a new way with it. I think Brad saw that with So Percussion or Alarm or Bang [on a Can] and wanted to put it in voices—asking, how do you make vocal writing more flexible, and it was natural to him to look outside of classical music to hear different sounds and react to them.8 The premise: members would explore new-to-them vocal techniques, learning from master teachers, and then, inspired by abstract sound rather than concrete notation-based material, unusual timbral combinations might emerge from commissioned composers and group members alike. Along the way, stylistic preferences and strengths might also emerge among performers of the widest reaches of vocal range: highest high to lowest low. It was less important that its membership be founded exclusively in classical technique as it was to have excellent musicianship and ensemble skills, pitch and rhythmic accuracy, and individual vocal training that produced such a solid baseline, that members could “cross-train” their instruments in new ways. Much as a chef of a certain cuisine might master basic skills and rules for preparation and presentation, RoT performers and composers

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  153 would be grounded in previous musical training that would allow them to innovate—according to taste. The aesthetic predilections and aversions of the group would gradually become clear as its membership explored their “new” instruments, over time and in new combinations. As one reviewer explained, “Roomful of Teeth is a vocal octet who embrace their classical training, wearing it on their sleeves, as they vigorously rip the sleeves off their suit jackets running through the forest.”9 The audition requirements for RoT asked vocalists to bring in as many styles of singing as they were comfortable presenting. While there was clear importance in being able to produce multiple styles and sounds, it was an equal if not higher priority that the practitioners be enthusiastic about trying new sounds, returning to a vulnerable state of absolute beginner. To ask members to be at once humble and hungry for new sonic combinations indelibly shaped the membership, repertoire, and group dynamic that these musicians would create together. Notably, the sightreading component was a well-known work, but not of vocal music: an excerpt from Béla Bartók’s Viola Concerto. This “test” was not about perfection, but about which singers kept going (to quote Berio’s Sinfonia).10 If the goal was to present premieres of new works extremely quickly, not unlike a Bach cantata performed in Leipzig with limited time and preparation, a kind of fearlessness was additionally required of these musicians. The “works in progress” concerts hosted by RoT, however, would follow an indepth two-week residency of sound exploration and collaborative editing, involving the performers’ aesthetic opinion far more than a Thomaskirche church service might. The original group assembled at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in June 2009, some as strangers, and some seasoned titans of New York City’s early and contemporary music scenes. The first three techniques and teachers were Swiss yodeling with Kerry Christensen, Broadway belting with Gayle Lockwood, and Tuvan throat singing with Ayan-ool Sam and Sean Quirk of the acclaimed Alash Ensemble. Teaching methods were almost always aural tradition-centered; while collaborative compositions would eventually be committed to notation, initial sound play, placement/proprioception, breath work, song examples and excerpts, warm-ups, and individual coachings were largely presented in call-and-response format. Vocalists were thrown into a “trust fall” dynamic in which perfect strangers (and/or esteemed colleagues) were then privy to these at times comical moments: sounds never before uttered, proclivities (and certainly limits!) never before discovered. No single singer achieved immediate excellence, or even proficiency, at all three techniques. Compositions were to include not just “authentic” or “successful” sounds (certainly loaded words, both), but instead the strange, in-between, deeply personal and imperfect sounds, specific to individual vocalists. Just as composers were expected to write for an expanded sound palate, vocalists scrambled to regulate and codify entirely new-to-them ways to sing. As individual preferences and new facets of each singer’s range were revealed, composers envisioned new recipes or “flavor combinations” that the ingredients themselves were still developing and discovering. Initial contributing composers were Judd Greenstein, Rinde Eckert, and a few members of the ensemble (noncommissioned): Avery Griffin, Eric Dudley, and Caroline Shaw. It perhaps bears

154  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling noting that Shaw, who was at the time loath to call herself a composer, had previously never written a piece for vocal ensemble. One of the pieces we will discuss further in the second section of this chapter is Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013. The movement that would become the last of the suite, Passacaglia, was composed first, in 2009, inspired by the artworks of Sol LeWitt throughout Mass MoCA; a moment in its premiere sticks out as important to mention in connection with the curious, omnivorous nature of RoT audiences. There is a returning trope of voice-doubled D-major chords in third inversion, first quiet (in head voice for upper voices), then more present (mixed voice), then belted. In the middle of the movement, all sung voices devolve into scraps of spoken text lifted directly from Sol LeWitt’s “Drawing 305,”11 a set of instructions for placing points on a wall, said to never be executed the same way; after a scatter of derivative pitch content, all voices descend into “vocal fry” or “creaky voice” before erupting into a bright, belted return to D major. RoT’s first audience, otherwise having observed typical classical-concert-style silence throughout, burst into loud cheers and applause, unprompted. The energy of delight in discovery—when, across cultures, all vocalists house the same instrument, that is yet often used in strikingly limited ways—propelled both musicians and audiences to continue to explore. The original concept of “chamber music for voices,” partially wordplay on the “chamber” of the mouth, lips, and teeth, morphed into more of a “band” mentality: as Shaw described, It’s going to be a little different every time, and we’re not giving you the 507th performance of this thing (like some people approach late Beethoven string quartets). This is more, HEY, this has not existed before, and it’s not perfect, here we are. When you go see a band, you’re not there to see the band play perfectly, you want to see the band be themselves and play sort of the thing you heard on the record, but a little differently. I love that.12 The Boston Globe in March 2015 echoed agreement: “Experimentation may be this group’s calling card, but its essence is pure joy.”13 Season to Taste: Explorations in Style and Composition Roomful of Teeth

Just as a performer of early music is expected to provide ornaments and embellishments beyond the notated score, a vocalist in RoT responds to very recently composed material with creativity and musical alternatives in mind. Shaw describes this connection between early and new music as a product of musical ideas that are, at their essence, not fixed. You look at the score [of a Monteverdi piece], and its whole notes and half notes and no dynamics … because when they were writing the music, there wasn’t the convention to write all this specific stuff down. You have

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  155 a freedom there and you can be creative … there’s room for improvisation in that. I think it’s the feeling of flexibility—that music is not fixed, that it’s being created in the moment—that both periods share, and the players of these kinds of music share that sensibility.14 Not only is musical improvisation possible, but it is as required in RoT as it is in early music settings. As Quantz writes in Chapter 8 of his 1752 treatise On Playing the Flute, Almost no one who devotes himself to the study of music … is content to perform only the essential graces; the majority feel moved to invent variations or extempore embellishments. In itself this inclination is not to be condemned, but it cannot be realized without an understanding of composition.15 In this way, RoT strives to engage more thoroughly with technical and stylistic embellishments than others might; instead of using only non-interactive online sources to explore new sounds and methods of ornamentation, RoT hopes to explore such sounds from a more informed understanding via our experienced teachers and composers. Such in-person interaction allows our membership to determine that which is essential and non-essential, stylistically, in real time. An oft-shared example of collaborative composition, rooted in the expectation that performers expand on composers’ ideas, can be found in the second movement of Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, Sarabande, composed in 2010. Shaw has described this movement as an exploration of juxtaposed sounds, inspired by the work RoT was doing with acclaimed Korean p’ansori teacher Eunsu Kim, to create a sonic shift from rough to smooth texture. However, when Shaw presented the group with her first draft, it became clear that repeated guttural exhalations through the entire movement were too drying and tiring to sustain vocally. The group experimented with a number of sounds and eventually landed on a more gentle, sing-songy swooping hum, inspired by a sliding vocal warm-up initially taught to me (Gomez) by beloved early and new music baritone, Sanford Sylvan. The creation of such a texture required a beautiful constellation of creative forces: composer, performers, teachers, and their sound worlds. From an environment of trust, collaboration, and necessity, Shaw’s Partita was born: wildly inventive yet singable, deeply imaginative yet a piece that both invited and required the active contributions of its performers. Another element that connects RoT to the practice of early music is the intimate nature of the ensemble, coupled with consistent membership that allows composers to write for specific voices. Beauchamp noted, In orchestras and operas, there are so many moving parts, and you can lose your individuality and intimacy. In early music and new music there’s such a DIY kind of small grassroots vibe, that you have to work together to make it happen. You can’t just show up and be part of the wheel.16

156  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling In residency at Mass MoCA, composers have one to two weeks to bring in as many drafts of their pieces as they would like to hear—William Brittelle famously wrote 64 versions of his piece Psychedelics during his residency—and are encouraged to write for each voice as a specific instrument, not solely a range chart. Much as composers in the eighteenth century wrote for specific voices or instruments— Händel for Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, Haydn for baryton player Prince Miklós, and so on—RoT’s composers meet with individuals to determine the nuances of their instruments and their preferences. Shaw mentioned again that size is a highly relevant factor: “The quantity of people involved creates an entirely different dynamic. You’re writing for the people you know—you know their instruments and artistic tendencies, which affects the writing.”17 In fact, until performing and recording Berio’s Sinfonia with the Seattle Symphony in 2016, all RoT works were new works specifically composed or arranged for its membership. When asked what defines a RoT piece, both Beauchamp and Shaw agreed that the above-mentioned qualities are crucial elements, beyond writing for a collection of omnivorous sight-readers. For Beauchamp, It’s just writing to the personalities of the particular eight voices that happen to be in the room with the composer. I think that we’ve amassed such a vocabulary together, and grown together as singers and artists and thinkers over the last many years, that we’ve demanded uniqueness from each other, and it’s brought out this massive palette of colors in each of us. Composers that see that, or we successfully show that to them—that’s a Teeth piece to me.18 And for Shaw, I feel like there’s a curiosity and flexibility and richness between the notes. How you go from that place, this color to the next, we’re interested in the spaces in between, rather than do this and then do that, which is what MIDI does. I feel like a Teeth piece is something that … cannot be replicated easily, but involves a lot of personality, individuality, flexibility. You have to care.19 A Far Cry

When asked the question “How does AFC learn a new style?” Irons replied: It depends on who is leading! Sometimes we may listen to an expert performance in a style that we’d like to be inspired by. There’s also a call-andresponse approach, if the leader has a clear vision—or they may add one person at a time until we’ve totally changed our sound.20 When AFC was learning the tune Turceasca, the group referred to a video by the Romanian-Romani band Taraf de Haidouks as a point to rally around. Bringing an expert into rehearsal is even better; the group has been doing that since AFC’s

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  157 inaugural concert, when Baroque violinist Kinloch Earle came in to work on a Corelli concerto grosso. Call-and-response is a favorite group tactic and happens particularly often when working the finer points of fiddle music with Liesl Doty, a former Crier who is also a fiddling champion. When a composer writes for the group, there is an extra element at play, depending on the extent to which the composer is invested in the stylistic elements of their piece. It is particularly powerful when the composer is able to engage on the level of instrumental craft, as so many composer-performers of the Baroque era would have effortlessly done. It’s not just that the composer becomes part of the group, but also that the group itself takes on a new creative luster. Andrew Norman, whose Companion Guide to Rome the group recorded, was meticulously specific about extended string techniques that he demonstrated on his viola, bringing the whole group into his sound-world. Irons recalls a “jaw-dropping C-major arpeggio”21 that Caroline Shaw used as an example for her Music in Common Time that immediately inspired stylistic alignment. The specific issues related to performance practice of Baroque music present a special set of opportunities and challenges for a group like AFC. Within the group, there is a critical mass of players who are familiar with both early music playing and with the scholarship that goes along with it. This subset of Criers (plus the collective experience of the rest of the group) has produced a wide variety of “historically informed” performances. Most typically, a Baroque work performed by A Far Cry will sound style-specific to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, laden with elements of rhetoric, extemporizations, and careful attention to questions of phrasing and bow usage (even though modern bows are used). Sometimes, however, the Criers will venture even further abroad—as, for example, when the group presented a concert revival of the First Brandenburg Concerto in Season 10, in early twentieth-century “Casals” style, laden with rich vibrato, generous bow usage, and sumptuous grand piano continuo. As the group’s sense of stylistic variation and the combined collective intelligence have become more unified over time, AFC’s performance choices have become not more similar, but more deliberately diverse. Familiarity with a wide variety of musical styles, together with a democratic engine that keeps that variation finely honed on the personal level, helps AFC thrive in today’s omnivore-friendly musical landscape. Irons describes this way of being as “musical progressivism.”22 One aspect of the approach that he particularly enjoys is the fact that “insight in one area can lead to unexpected dividends in an entirely different area.” In one case, he recalls, experience playing Baroque music led him to the realization that playing without vibrato could help string players unify their bow strokes more effectively—a realization that shows up to great effect in the last note of AFC’s Grammy-nominated performance of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. A downside to this variety of styles, Irons notes, is the fact that it can lead to protected “siloes” that require a high technical bar or specialized equipment to enter. But ultimately, the challenge of committing deeply to the level of work required within each of the silos creates a richly satisfying musical experience. “Ultimately” he says, “it’s about showing the path forward to better musicmaking.”23

158  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling In this context, rich with a variety of possibilities, how does a composer approach the prospect of working with AFC? There may not be such a thing as one typical “AFC piece,” but there are several tendencies that have come to the fore over the group’s commissioning history. Composers who are familiar with certain musicians in the group will often use those musicians’ strengths as inspiration, in the same way that Vivaldi might have been constantly assessing the talent assembled at the Pietà. Workshopping in general, whether or not it is through an individual Crier conduit, is a favorite AFC tactic when interfacing with composers. As the group refined The Blue Hour, an evening-length song cycle collaboratively composed by Angelica Negrón, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Caroline Shaw, Shara Nova, and Rachel Grimes, AFC went through multiple drafts of the work over the space of nearly a year. Another particularly memorable workshop was with composer Shiori Usui, whose In Digestion challenged Criers to reproduce processed sounds from the digestive system using both instruments and voices. “There’s a sense of saying ‘Yes!’ to composers and all of their ideas,” relates Lewis. “It’s like throwing stuff into a beaker to see what will happen.”24 There is a shared understanding that the process will remain intensely collaborative between composer and group until the concert takes place—and likely beyond that point as well. For several composers, the idea of AFC itself—many distinct voices making up a whole—has become central to their compositions. When writing The Conference of the Birds for the group, Lembit Beecher took inspiration both from the autonomous flight of a flock of birds, as well as from the Persian poem of that name. Individual voices rise and fall within the group, eventually creating a critical mass and taking flight. In Ethan Wood’s “Ah! vous dirai-je Maman: A Folk Tale for Eighteen String Players Based on Characters Created by W. A. Mozart,” Wood keeps the 18 staves in play the entire time, sometimes hocketing back and forth on a note-by-note basis to create a longer line. In order for the group to realize the intention of the work, the players need to engage in a high-wire act of collective balance in which they sound almost exactly (and yet, not quite) like each other as they pass the material around. All the work of learning to lead and follow, blend, and immediately switch styles is on display in a moment like this. Self-awareness is a given when playing music as exposed and explicitly referential as this, in a fiercely democratic setting. Although it can be challenging, selfawareness has generally been a positive force for AFC; a chance for the group to observe and regulate itself. It also creates a through line between different aspects of group identity. From the aesthetic side to the organizational one, nothing is done without looking in the mirror, and every action that results is a deliberate one. Tweaking the Recipe: Guiding Structures A Far Cry

Structure and process are at the very heart of AFC—even as the details of those very systems are under constant revision. In the first section, we discussed how the

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  159 root system of rotating leadership holds the key to the group’s stylistic flexibility. Equally relevant is a commitment to the structure of group rehearsal. When AFC started, it was regularly described by members as a “free-for-all.” Any one of the 18 musicians who wanted to speak could call a halt to the rehearsal and say their piece. This produced several immediate problems: principals were not free to structure rehearsal flow, there was no guarantee that the works would be prepared in their entirety, and perhaps the most pernicious: certain member voices would remain quiet in the hopes of maximizing rehearsal time while others felt compelled to offer ideas again and again. To deal with these issues, the group iterated around a very specific rehearsal method in the early years. At the beginning of every rehearsal, a timekeeper and a “spanker” were chosen, to keep the group on track and to make sure everyone was abiding by the rules. The rules to be followed were these: 1. When the group is playing, only a principal player can ask the ensemble to stop. 2. Once the group has stopped, it will entertain two rehearsal comments, one from the person who initiated the stop, and one from someone else. We would then incorporate those comments into the process and resume the rehearsal. 3. A tutti player may only comment twice per rehearsal. This high amount of regulation actually produced a means of rehearsing that felt smooth, efficient, and controlled—and achieved an important equity goal of incorporating a greater variety of voices into the rehearsal process. As AFC has continued to grow, some of that early rigor has become less ruledriven and more incorporated into the standard group behavior. These days, a rehearsal process is more likely to follow a pattern where the principal players run the show nearly completely at the beginning, opening the floor only for clarifying questions. A member of the principal group called a “spoke,” who has done some extra pre-artistic work to shape the piece, shares a week-long plan of action with the entire group, so that everyone knows what to expect. (The presence of the spoke also helps to alleviate the weight of extra guidance that otherwise falls by default on the concertmaster.) As rehearsals continue, the floor is officially opened for tutti members to put forth comments. During that time, all members and guest musicians are strongly urged to contribute, and everyone, including principals, is at the disposal of the person making the comment, allowing them to “drive” for their allotted amount of time (which is carefully monitored and divided up equally). These systems will certainly continue to evolve. One thing we have learned, however, is that the absence of structure creates its own de facto structure—and that realization gives us greater confidence to try out techniques which, although they may look rigid on the surface, can contain powerful keys to solving otherwise invisible issues. The way that AFC designs programs has also been largely informed by the group’s changing relationship with structure. In the first years of the group, AFC programs were determined collectively and often ended up looking a little like the “dinner plate” paradigm—a large Romantic “main course” paired with a flashy

160  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling starter and some smaller, likely contemporary, dishes. But at a certain point, program creation shifted to individuals, and when that happened, everything began to change. Programs became more idiosyncratic and exploratory, and we began to think about the whole season as the “plate” instead: full of strongly flavored programs that could be anything from a collaboration with a dance company to a new music “challenge” structure that dared the audience to “make it to the end!” AFC programs do, however, have to make it through the group’s approval process and onto a season. The group votes on programs throughout the year, stashing them in a “vault” that contains dozens of submissions. This allows AFC members to program freely at any point without thinking of the constraints of a season. Finally, when it’s time for the group to create a season, several rounds of voting, storytelling, and advocating are devised—always slightly different depending on who is leading the charge and what the current situation demands—that winnow down the programs and produce a final product that is complete and compelling. The last structure that has been crucial to AFC since the beginning is a shared commitment to administrative tasks. Of course, this was largely due to necessity when the group was starting from scratch, but it quickly evolved into something else: a chance for the members to take an unprecedented level of control over the entire operation, from strategic decision making to our marketing image to relationship building. A system like this has both positives and negatives embedded within it; the grassroots control allows a unique path to be charted but also comes with the peril of burnout and the simple fact that these jobs are more efficiently and impactfully done by true professionals. Grace Kennerly, AFC’s executive director, describes her take on this paradox: When I first started with AFC, I was flabbergasted by the amount that everyone was doing. One of the immediate points of fascination for me was: in my mind it was very clear that there should be a strong delineation between what was delegated to staff vs. what would be a hat that one of the Criers would wear. What I quickly learned was how much of a point of pride it was for the musicians in the group to have that ownership and on-the-ground influence over how the organization was being run.25 Aided by a recent strategic plan, Kennerly is currently leading a “highly incremental” transition away from the previous administrative structure (which was itself designed to eventually bring AFC to a point where it could support an executive director; the group used to joke “We want you to fire us!” when referring to everyone’s administrative jobs). She works with the Criers to determine what the best path forward is with each of the dozens of roles an organization like this is built around. All her artistic counterparts are aware of just how creative and important each of those roles is. But that also creates its own tension for an administrator: It’s the ultimate double-edged sword, which the entire organization feels strongly about maintaining, but also recognizes the inherent curve balls that it throws you. On the one hand, the ability to tap into this gold mine of

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  161 18 brilliant individual voices who are all experts and deep thinkers in the field, and then in the same exact forum, needing to move along a decision or come to consensus, thinking it’s going to go one way, and then realizing that a certain process is just going to take much longer than initially anticipated because you do need to take the time to engage each of those voices.26 Roomful of Teeth

RoT, by contrast, has never functioned democratically in an administrative sense but has always pursued democratic ideals in its musical rehearsal process and the sharing of aesthetic opinion. Shaw remarked, Ours [compared to AFC] is a little more anarchy … but, feeling like everyone can speak. Even in the creation of something new, or the editing of something old, there’s no standard order of speaking, and you don’t look to only one person in rehearsal.27 Individuals are given time and respect for their tastes and opinions and encouraged to contribute much as one would in a Quaker meeting house—“when you feel so moved,”28 Beauchamp noted. The value placed on individual artistic opinion, as mentioned in discussion of “what makes a RoT piece,” has been integral in the basic musical structure of the group. Shaw described this as a creative investment and care that comes from everybody … it’s encouraged and allowed and required [in RoT]. You don’t come and just like, read it down. You bring it. You’re asked to bring it, which I think some [orchestral] players would like to be asked [for their opinion], but that’s not being asked. That’s not the environment, and there’s not the structure for that.29 In a way, the structure of RoT’s rehearsal process did begin in distinct parallel with its administrative agenda: get as many strong musicians to care and contribute as creatively as possible, as much as possible. However, the burden of the logistical enterprise of the non-profit lay solely on the shoulders of founding artistic director, Brad Wells, for nearly six years. Only in 2015 did it become financially feasible to hire a tour manager, and further involvement of a board, president, treasurer, and any other administrative personnel was nearly nonexistent until 2021. Beauchamp spoke to the process of becoming co-artistic director in 2020, over a decade after the group’s inception: It’s a very common thing for a founder of an organization to put in all the work before it happens, and then take a lot of responsibility and ownership both emotionally and physically for all of the work for a long time, to not burden the people that they are employing. I think these organizations often hit a bump, at around the same point that we did, around ten years or so, where the person who put in all this work is now exhausted, and that’s the

162  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling time that it becomes professionalized. The people that have also been giving their lives to the organization for so many years, say it’s time for us to step up, to let this person rest, and to take our individual visions for the organization and to give it new breath.30 In 2020 Beauchamp and managing director Sunny Cyr began sowing seeds of a new administrative structure for RoT that is still being reworked and explored in 2022. The organizational requirements and premise, from an artist’s perspective, began in 2009 with an expectation that one might find the least expensive travel plans possible (read: overnight Greyhound buses and redeye flights straight into rehearsals), a place to sleep perhaps on a friend’s couch, and to cover associated food expenses. After 13 years of incredible dedication from our artistic team, RoT artists are now expected to arrive prepared and ready to be creative, with prearranged comfortable travel itineraries, lodging, and per diems all provided. Cyr described the transition of alleviating these logistical burdens on artists: I think a big part of the previous regime was really in task assignment rather than role assignment. Different people might do the same task for different projects depending on who exactly was available in the moment, but of course that is extremely inefficient. Now we are trying to be clearer on who does what … [but still] based in the same kind of collaborative spirit and trust that happens with the performers.31 Conclusion: The Expanding Palate A passage from The Michigan Daily beautifully summarizes why omnivorous musicians do what we do: At its heart, public music making is about the way in which we exist in the same time and place as other people. It’s about how we communicate with and relate to one another. The playing of music is a conversation of sorts, an interaction undertaken between the musicians and the listeners, each member of the dialogue giving something and taking something away. It’s not a coincidence, then, that some of the most interesting and engaging music composed both throughout history and today comes from a wellspring of mutually supportive and inspiring relationships between musicians.32 Indeed, such supportive and trusting relationships are the connective links that AFC and RoT have built upon to create new sound worlds, empowering structures, and non-traditional artistic employment opportunities. Both groups have strived to connect with and serve more omnivorous audiences, developing dialogues intended to earn the trust and loyalty of our listeners. Our listeners are the last, crucial link in the musical chain. Without their participation and enthusiasm, everything else remains in the realm of the theoretical. This is perhaps the oldest truth in the history of concertizing. An ancient Zen story

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  163 describes a relationship between a musician and a sympathetic listener; at the end of that story, when the listener dies, the musician cuts the strings of his harp and falls silent.33 Hundreds of years later, halfway around the world, Quantz encouraged his students when evaluating music to pay attention to three things: The piece itself, the performer, and the listener … With regard to the listeners, just as the performers, much depends upon differences of temperament. Some love what is majestic and lively, some what is melancholy and somber, and some what is delicate and gay, according to their various inclinations.34 The basic understanding from both of these examples is that the performer’s journey can never be an entirely solitary one. It is rooted in collaboration, and the creation of synergy between performers is just the first step. RoT’s audience, for example, has grown beyond the brick walled cafés of Mass MoCA. Myriad collaborations with guest teachers and composers have connected the group with hungry new ears, especially those already dissatisfied with siloed single-genre limitations. Notable listeners-turned-collaborators have been Kanye West, Bryce Dessner, Alev Lenz, Carter Burwell, Rebecca Karijord, and Justin Peck, among others. An NPR Tiny Desk concert, live and recorded music for the documentary The Colorado, and soundtrack appearances on Netflix’s show Dark as well as Beyoncé’s Homecoming have introduced the group to new audiences; in 2022 RoT was featured on the soundtrack of a film adaptation of the novel Catherine, Called Birdy, directed by Lena Dunham. One of the key differences between RoT and AFC in audience demographic and development is that AFC claims a “home base” in a single geographic area: Boston, MA, where the local season forms the basis for much of the group’s activity. AFC’s omnivorous audience has held steady from concert to concert, whether they are listening to something largely classical, largely contemporary, or a mixture of both. Within the group, there is a long-standing joke that AFC aspires to be an “omakase ensemble,” a reference to the Japanese tradition of a high-quality meal created entirely by the chef to surprise and delight the diner. Lewis’s description of the AFC audience suggests that the ensemble is on its way to meeting that goal: We’d go out to play a concert and the audience just loves you before you play a note. And that’s unusual for a classical audience, usually they wait until you’ve played to assess. But our audience is already happy, they’re ready to enjoy. It’s very active.35 RoT and AFC prioritize a form of performance practice that comes to life through the collective work of many individuals. These performers attempt to convey something extremely specific that requires a deliberate construction. Put another way, this performance practice means approaching the performance itself through a contextual frame, as opposed to an instinctual one. This deliberate action is richly aided by having a committed group of people with a diverse set of skills, making it possible to really lean into the specifics that define any serious attempt at creating

164  Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling an informed performance. It is also helped by having that group of people commit to a process-based approach that allows for learning and for stylistic growth. Ultimately, the choices that RoT and AFC have made about structure open the door for a particularly meaningful form of performance practice—one that truly engages every group member, and one that encourages the direct participation of our listeners. Both groups ask a lot of our audiences: that they are active participants in celebrating new sounds and sonic juxtapositions; that they are game to explore those spaces and empowered to decide for themselves what they enjoy or dislike; and most of all, that they trust the musicians enough that they are willing to participate in a repertoire and aesthetic that is ever evolving. Special pieces and programming gestures may re-emerge, but the experience of each group in live performance and recordings is, ultimately, more likely to be “discovery plate” than “comfort food.” When process and innovation are inherent in the brand of one’s product, the only constant is change itself. While change is always going to be on the menu in one way or another, we believe trust is the essential ingredient that holds the dish together. The presence of trust among audiences and performers alike is absolutely necessary to create an environment for trying new styles and methods of programming, for freedom of expression and improvisation, for putting together music extremely quickly, for writing and performing collaboratively with individual artists in mind, and for basing one’s life and livelihood on the artistic and structural follow-through of its membership and administrative team. These models of creation, at times in parallel and otherwise varied, allow both groups not only to explore omnivorous music making, but to share years of trust-based, inventive programming and commissioning with audiences who have a taste for adventure. Notes 1 Zoë Madonna, “A Far Cry, Roomful of Teeth Prove a Match Made in New-Music Heaven,” Boston Globe, April 16, 2017, https://c​.o0bg​.com​/arts​/music​/2017​/04​/16​/ far​-cry​-roomful​-teeth​-prove​-match​-made​-new​-music​-heaven​/xT4​yQUV​nRja​XimH​ 1HT8jaL​/story​.html (accessed July 5, 2022). 2 Dayton Hare, “Acclaimed Chamber Ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth to Perform Works by Caroline Shaw and Ted Hearne,” The Michigan Daily, April 10, 2017, https://www​.michigandaily​.com​/arts​/acclaimed​-chamber​-ensembles​-far​-cry​-and​-roomful​-teeth​-perform​-works​-caroline​-shaw​-and/ (accessed July 5, 2022). 3 James Oestreich, “Music In Review: A Far Cry,” The New York Times, January 13, 2011, https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/01​/14​/arts​/music​/14round​.html?​_r=0 (accessed July 5, 2022). 4 Jesse Irons, interview with Sarah Darling, January 13, 2022. 5 Megumi Lewis, interview with Sarah Darling, January 17, 2022. 6 Jesse Irons, interview with Sarah Darling, January 13, 2022. 7 Mahan Esfahani, “An Introduction to the Program,” program notes for A Far Cry, From Darkness to Light. October 29, 2007. Cambridge, MA. 8 Cameron Beauchamp, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 9 Soundfly Partners, “5 New Albums I’ve Been Digging This Month,” May 2015, http:// soundfly​.com​/reviews​/5​-new​-albums​-ive​-been​-digging​-this​-month/ (July 5, 2022).

Feeding the Flexible Omnivore  165 10 In Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), written for eight amplified voices and orchestra, vocalists repeatedly mutter or yell “keep going!” throughout. 11 This work is located at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, and viewable at https://massmoca​.org​/event​/walldrawing305/ (accessed July 5, 2022). 12 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 13 David Weininger, “Roomful of Teeth Shares Unorthodox Vocal Wonders,” The Boston Globe, March 20, 2015, https://www​.bostonglobe​.com​/arts​/music​/2015​/03​/19​/roomful​-teeth​-shares​-unorthodox​-vocal​-wonders​/HRD​J9Al​IEsi​EUrF​jBHkmHI​/story​.html (accessed July 5, 2022). 14 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 15 Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, ed. and trans. Edward R. Reilly (New York: Schirmer Books, 1966), 136. 16 Cameron Beauchamp, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 17 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 18 Cameron Beauchamp, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 19 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 20 Jesse Irons, interview with Sarah Darling, January 13, 2022. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Megumi Lewis, interview with Sarah Darling, January 17, 2022. 25 Grace Kennerly, interview with Sarah Darling, January 5, 2022. 26 Ibid. 27 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 28 Cameron Beauchamp, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 29 Caroline Shaw, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 30 Cameron Beauchamp, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 31 Sunny Cyr, interview with Estelí Gomez, August 19, 2021. 32 Hare, “Acclaimed Chamber Ensembles.” 33 S.n. “True Friends” in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, ed. Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1994), 129. 34 Quantz, On Playing The Flute, 298. 35 Megumi Lewis, interview with Sarah Darling, January 17, 2022.

11 The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian Kailan R. Rubinoff

Among the many recordings of Claudio Monteverdi’s dramatic music, critics consistently praise Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s version of L’Orfeo, which “took a historical artifact … and made of it something that changed the way many people felt about early opera and about Monteverdi.”1 One particular singer, performing the cameo roles of La Messagiera (The Messenger) and Speranza (Hope), is frequently singled out: Cathy Berberian’s voice is “clear and powerful,” and “one hangs on every word as she announces, then describes, Euridice’s death in quiet, mournful tones.”2 Opera News concluded, “We could go on about this, but her artistry demands to be heard, not discussed.”3 CD reissues make it possible to do both (Figure 11.1). Berberian’s Monteverdi performances are regularly cited as groundbreaking, even while their production values mark them audibly as artifacts of 1960s historically informed performance (HIP). More remarkable, however, is that Berberian ever ventured into the early music world at all: by the late 1960s, she was best known as the “Avant-Garde’s Queen Bee.”4 Throughout her career from the late 1950s until her untimely death in 1983, she premiered more than two dozen works, including compositions by Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud, and collaborated with leading experimentalists, notably Luciano Berio (to whom she was married from 1950 until circa 1964, with Berio writing some of his most innovative works for her), John Cage, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Sylvano Bussotti, and Louis Andriessen. Berberian solidified her reputation as a contemporary music interpreter through a sizeable discography and appearances at new music festivals, including Tanglewood, Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, Venice, and Bremen.5 The public was familiar with another Berberian, who embraced popular culture, humor, and skillful entertainment. In 1966, Berberian reinvented her persona, dyeing her hair blonde and adopting an exuberant stage presence.6 She also began programming more varied recitals, juxtaposing “serious” contemporary music alongside her own composition, Stripsody (1966), based on the language, sounds, and images of comic strips, and humorous “classical” covers of Beatles tunes. She articulated her vision for the ideal singer in a manifesto, “La nuova vocalità nell’opera contemporanea,” defining it as a “voice which has an endless range of vocal styles at its disposal, embracing the history of music as well as aspects of sound itself; marginal perhaps compared to the music, but fundamental to human DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-15

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  167

Figure 11.1  Cover of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien, Monteverdi, 9-CD set, disc 9, Cathy Berberian Sings Monteverdi. Warner Classics 825646314829, 2014. Courtesy of Warner Music UK, Ltd.

beings.”7 In this chapter, I focus on the implications of such an “embracing [of] the history of music” through the voice. Berberian’s transformation of her image and performing style corresponded with her estrangement from Berio, along with her increasing disaffection with the contemporary music scene.8 As she asserted her artistic individuality and cultivated her public persona, composers and critics admired Berberian’s abilities: a willingness to experiment with new notation forms and technologies, a flexible voice spanning three octaves, a facility for singing in multiple languages, an uninhibited and captivating stage presence, and a capacity to emulate an array of vocal utterances, singers and styles. These qualities led one Italian newspaper to quip, “Cathy Berberian has at least ten voices.”9 Berberian’s multifaceted career has encouraged scholars to challenge a predominantly male-dominated and work-centered historiography of twentieth-century European concert music.10 In advocating for a “new vocality,” Berberian exerted

168  Kailan R. Rubinoff creative agency in her collaborations, complicating the separation of composer and performer, and the gender stereotypes such a binary has reinforced.11 But what are we to make of Berberian’s “early music” vocality? Given her experimental music background, the casting of Berberian in “historically informed” Monteverdi recordings in the late 1960s and early 1970s was surprising, no less to the singer herself. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was a respected figure in the post-War early music revival: a cellist, viola da gamba player, and conductor, he and his violinist wife Alice established Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953 to perform Baroque and Classical repertoire on period instruments, and they made many acclaimed recordings for Telefunken’s Das Alte Werk series.12 The Harnoncourts and Concentus Musicus, with their more exacting standards and exploration of challenging music by canonical composers, played a role in professionalizing HIP, which had a reputation for amateurishness or staid sobriety.13 How, then, did Cathy Berberian come to explore early music and collaborate with Harnoncourt? What might a closer examination of these performances and the circumstances surrounding their creation tell us about Berberian’s career and interpretive prowess? And how did her interpretations of Monteverdi—featuring an Austrian conductor and an Armenian-American contemporary vocalist—come to be seen as the paradigm for performing seventeenth-century Italian music in an “authentic,” or historically informed, manner? I argue that Berberian’s recordings of early (pre-1800) works played an important role for her personally by reinvigorating her career at key junctures. Those recordings were also significant for the post-War historical performance movement: Berberian’s technical skills raised performing standards, while her flexible use of timbre, vibrato, and gesture challenged assumptions about the appropriateness of particular voice types for early music. Her association with the musical avant garde also brought with it a certain (counter)cultural cachet. In short, Berberian embodied in one person both the creative promise and the contradictions of the post-War experimental and early music scenes, the implications of which continue to shape these creative spaces today. Berberian’s Early Career and Early Music Circles Berberian’s unconventional background and training opened her to a variety of musics and performance approaches. Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1925 to immigrant parents of Armenian descent, Berberian moved to the outskirts of New York City where, as an adolescent, she explored literature, acting, and Armenian folk dancing, and avidly listened to opera recordings.14 Rather than attending a conservatory, she took private voice lessons and classes at Columbia and New York Universities. To further her ambition of becoming an opera singer, Berberian traveled in 1948 to Paris and took lessons from Marya Freund, an associate of Arnold Schoenberg.15 By late 1949 she pursued further studies in Milan with Georgina del Vigo. While preparing a recording for (an ultimately successful) Fulbright application, she met Luciano Berio, then a Milan Conservatory student. She and Berio became

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  169 romantically involved, marrying in October 1950. Recalling their early years, Berio remarked, She had this incredible voice, and the versatility of her, not only of her voice but her mind was astonishing. [It was] new for me because in Italy you couldn’t find something like that. Usually an Italian singer has a direction on which he or she stays for the rest of her/of his life. While she was extremely curious. Of course, being curious myself we worked a lot together.16 Berio and Berberian’s first projects included Lucia di Lammermoor (1951), appearances at Tanglewood (1952), and the premiere of his Chamber Music (1953).17 She curtailed public performances after the birth of their daughter Cristina later that year. In the 1950s, Milan was “a city still physically scarred by the war years, but vigorous in its self-renewal.”18 Berberian would have encountered a strongly patriarchal society shaped by the moral codes of the Catholic Church, where women had limited agency and few participated in the workforce. Throughout Italy, “The ideal type of the full-time housewife—presented as a self-sacrificing mother/wife and an efficient home manager—was imposed on all women, whether in paid jobs or not.”19 For an American navigating this foreign culture and language, sustaining a professional singing career while being married and raising children would have been difficult. While at home during her daughter’s early years, Berberian was situated within the stimulating milieu of Berio’s creative network. From 1953, Berio worked at Milan Radio Audizioni Italiane (RAI), experimenting with electronics and tape. Through the conductor Hermann Scherchen, he met Bruno Maderna. The scholar and writer Umberto Eco, also at RAI from 1954, joined their artistic and intellectual community.20 In 1955 Berio and Maderna established the Studio di Fonologia Musicale (studio for electro-acoustical research) and invited foreign composers, including Henri Pousseur, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Luigi Nono. Their Incontri Musicali concert series and magazine featured contemporary music.21 Berberian was valued for her cooking and conversational abilities, but gradually she was recognized for her translation skills, keen intelligence, and musical adventurousness.22 Although out of the public eye, Berberian remained creative by providing spoken and sung material for Berio and Maderna’s tape experiments.23 To Eco and Berio’s discussions of linguistics, translation, and onomatopoeia in Ulysses, she lent her critical perspective as a native English speaker along with her voice, culminating in Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958).24 Both Eco and Maderna supported Berberian’s career, while Cage helped her uncover new vocal possibilities while working on Aria (1958).25 These composers and intellectuals were emerging as major figures in Europe’s post-War experimental music scene. Simultaneously, several were exploring early music. Both Maderna (1920–1973) and Berio (1925–2003) came of age at the height of Mussolini’s regime, which glorified the great figures and feats of the

170  Kailan R. Rubinoff Italian past, including its musical heritage. Fascist critics held up Monteverdi as a model they hoped would promote operatic renewal.26 Early Italian music played a formative role in Berio’s and Maderna’s educations.27 In the early 1940s Maderna studied composition with Gian Francesco Malipiero, editor of the Vivaldi and Monteverdi editions, instilling in him a penchant for arranging early repertoires.28 A child prodigy, Maderna conducted an “Aria dell’Ingrata” by Monteverdi in a 1941 concert of “classical Venetian music.”29 Even after the war as a renowned contemporary music interpreter, Maderna routinely arranged, orchestrated, and conducted early music. For Monteverdi’s quadricentennial (1967), he directed L’incoronazione di Poppea in Milan and his own arrangement of L’Orfeo at the Holland Festival.30 Maderna first engaged Berberian in performances of seventeenth-century music, inviting her in 1956 to sing in Purcell’s Suite from The Fairy Queen. The album, which includes Maderna’s transcriptions from Petrucci’s Harmonice musices odhecaton A and Scherchen’s arrangements of English Renaissance dances, credits Berberian as “Catherine Berio,” here making her recording debut.31 Despite occasional pitch issues and labored melismas (exacerbated by Maderna’s slow tempi), there are hints of Berberian’s vocal agility in “Hark! Hark! the Echoing Air”: she conveys the music’s joyful affect, she shades her voice and varies the vibrato speed, and her diction is remarkably clear. Maderna next programmed Berberian on an Incontri Musicali concert in Naples in 1958, marking her return to the contemporary music stage.32 Nevertheless, Purcell remained in her repertoire, although she did not yet explore earlier works. Composer/musicologist Leonard Stein had, in 1960, suggested she sing seventeenth-century Italian music by Luzzaschi and Monteverdi.33 Stein worked with the Los Angeles Monday Evening Concerts, where Berberian performed earlier that year; under director Lawrence Morton, they became a site where contemporary and early musics intersected.34 Stein, Morton, and Maderna mixed new and early music in concert programming, a practice Berberian later adopted. Berio’s training at the Milan Conservatory included historical repertoires. He studied counterpoint with Giulio Cesare Paribeni, whose interests included Ancient Greek music theory and Renaissance polyphony.35 His composition teacher was Giorgio Ghedini, a neoclassicist who arranged works by Frescobaldi and J. S. Bach and edited Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and Schütz. Berio credited Ghedini with “not only the love with which he was able to instill in me for Baroque musical culture but above all for what concerns my relationship with Monteverdi.”36 His own Monteverdian forays included an arrangement of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, a production of L’Orfeo, and an incomplete reworking of Poppea.37 Unlike Maderna and Stein, however, Berio initially discouraged Berberian from singing Italian Baroque repertoire, because her voice was not “abbastanza pastosa italiana” to sing Monteverdi (a “pasta-like” Italian voice may refer to elasticity and flexibility).38 But Berio changed his mind as he became more engaged with Monteverdi in the early 1960s. As Berberian related in a 1974 interview,

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  171 In 1963, when he was composing Epifanie, [Berio] needed a particular effect, the nota battuta that occurs in many of Monteverdi’s compositions …. I had never sung Monteverdi before because the Italians told me my voice was not suited to it. I believed them—in those years I was very obedient, I had little faith in myself. Luciano asked me to see if I could do it. He never told me it had anything to do with Monteverdi. “Try it!” he said. I did. “You sound like a lamb, you are bleating.” I had another go at it. “Now you sound as if you were having a stomachache.” I tried again. And suddenly there it was—I made it. Berio said: “That’s it! Keep it!” That was how I learned to sing nota battuta; it is not easy.39 Epifanie’s texted sections call for various vocal effects.40 Berberian describes her “epiphany” in recreating the nota battuta—not through studying historical sources (e.g., Caccini’s Le nuove musiche41), but rather through emulating electronic sounds and vocal play with Berio.42 In exploring the “new vocality,” Berberian inadvertently recovered an early singing technique, one that her contemporaries performing and recording early music had little explored. The composition Epifanie had a much longer genesis.43 The relevant passage appears in episode VI; Joyce’s sensual text, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, relates the protagonist’s own epiphany as he describes a fantastic girl-bird on the seashore. The (unlabeled) nota battuta underscores the word “bird” in bar 440 (see Figure 11.2); Berio noted in a 1981 interview, “you could call it a ‘madrigalism.’”44 Even such ambivalence acknowledges his indebtedness to Monteverdi, whose musical language—mediated through Berberian—had become a vehicle for experimentation with vocal gesture and the creation of a new composition.45 Berio further developed his approach to gesture in Sequenza III, a work composed for Berberian in 1966, the same year he arranged Monteverdi’s Combattimento.46 Berberian and Berio’s collaborations brought them into contact with the likeminded Swiss harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer. Having studied with Wanda Landowska and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Vischer turned away from early music to commission new harpsichord works.47 Berio composed Rounds with Voice (1964) for Vischer, which she recorded with Berberian; Vischer’s partner, Markus Kutter, contributed the text (and also for Sequenza III).48 Berberian presented Vischer with a harpsichord version of her piano composition Morsicat(h)y (1969).49 Their friendship stimulated new possibilities for a historical instrument and fostered musical renewal in Basel. Beatles, Baroccheggiante Berberian’s further engagement with seventeenth-century works came, ironically, from exploring a different contemporary music: the Beatles’ popular songs. Introduced to them through her teenage daughter, Berberian began singing covers in her 1966 recitals, including three in her Carnegie Hall début.50 She recorded 12 in Guy Boyer arrangements later that year.51

© Copyright 1992 by Universal Edition A.G., Vienna.

Figure 11.2  Luciano Berio, Epiphanies, VI (text by James Joyce), bars 440–442.

172  Kailan R. Rubinoff

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  173 Berberian was one of many art musicians genuinely interested in the Beatles.52 Boyer’s versions emphasized “classicizing” tendencies already in the songs, while parlaying the growing market for Baroque-inspired instrumental arrangements; they feature an ensemble of strings and winds, with a harpsichordist adding chordal interjections or arpeggiated passagework. Early instruments—especially harpsichords, lutes, and recorders—were permeating rock, jazz, and other popular musics of this period, adding timbral variety and making for porous boundaries between musical genres.53 Berberian’s singing, by contrast, references various styles, from the husky chest voice and exaggerated sucking-in sounds (like a cigarette-drawing cabaret singer) of “Girl,” to “Yesterday,” which (as she put it) “sounds like Joan Baez who’s studied with somebody like Elisabeth Schumann.”54 Such songs furthered Berberian’s project of blurring high and low, and old and new, musics; they were also a form of “feminist camp” marked by “impersonation, masquerade and burlesque.”55 Other Beatles covers make more explicit reference to Baroque style in form, harmony, and instrumentation; in her performances and commentary on them Berberian presents insights into her approach to early music. She especially liked arrangements by Louis Andriessen, whom she had befriended during his studies with Berio in Milan (1962–1963) and Berlin (1964–1965).56 Andriessen, studying Ives and Stravinsky, frequently evoked earlier styles through quotation, emulation, or parody in his compositions circa 1964–1972.57 Two covers, “Ticket to Ride” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” are particularly indebted to the Baroque (for the latter, Andriessen specified a Purcellian harpsichord accompaniment).58 Lennon and McCartney’s original itself imitates Bob Dylan’s folkish tambourine playing and grainy singing, but the Andriessen–Berberian cover has been “updated” (backdated?) to add further irony: The lackadaisical compound meter has been sped up to resemble a Baroque gigue, while Berberian’s cheery “fa-la-laing” in the final bars (at odds with wistful lyrics of unrequited love) more explicitly parodies English Renaissance madrigals.59 In “Ticket to Ride,” Andriessen merges the AABA Beatles song form with early eighteenth-century operatic conventions. A recitative-like keyboard introduction concludes with a trill prepared with upper-note appoggiatura, leading into the “aria,” whose verse and chorus are accompanied by a neo-Baroque ostinato conjuring the bus or train implied by the title. The motoric rhythm is interrupted by the recurring recitative material in the B section (at “I don’t know…”) before the final verse and chorus.60 Berberian described her parodic approach as evoking “a kooky Handel oratorio singer,” or “as it might be sung by a Handel oratorio singer in the provinces.”61 Her performances are a masterclass in affectation: she rolls her r’s in exaggerated fashion (on “ride” and “care”); the line “bringing him down” is sung to rising arpeggios and purposefully out-of-control high notes, a kind of antimadrigalism; while the coda’s final line concludes with an elongated trill/cadenza. Luciano Berio developed another setting of “Ticket to Ride,” along with “Yesterday” and two versions of “Michelle” for Berberian’s September 1967 Venice Biennale recital; three of these are “baroccheggiante.”62 In “Michelle 1,” the voice is accompanied by a harpsichord and two flutes (or flute and oboe); the

174  Kailan R. Rubinoff upper parts feature motoric rhythms and canons at the octave, resembling the fast movements of Telemann’s 12 Canons mélodieux (Paris, 1738) or the duets in Der getreue Music-Meister.63 The nostalgic “Yesterday” is replete with gallant figurations, including a florid flute obbligato (typical of Handel or Telemann adagios), a harpsichord continuo realization, and a Corellian walking bass.64 “Ticket to Ride,” by contrast, evokes J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos through its orchestration of flute, oboe, trumpet, violin, viola, cello, bass, and harpsichord (Concerto ˆ 7ˆ 8ˆ motive (Concerto No. 3, first movement). No. 2) and repeated scale degree 8Episode 5 of C’è musica e musica includes a rehearsal and performance of “Ticket to Ride,”65 and in voiceovers, Berio and Berberian make clear the aesthetic and ideological purposes of their cover: [Berio]: Gestures, words, sounds: just as one can modify the meaning of a word, of a sentence, depending on the way it is said, so too can one modify, by changing the context, the meaning of a gesture—also of a vocal gesture or a style or a vocal posturing. [Berberian, in the background, attempts to sing the song’s opening in a higher tessitura and laughs with the orchestra.] [Berio] For example, this little song of the Beatles, a “Ticket to Ride,” also changes when it is placed in an arrangement that is different from the original. In other words, with a Baroque-ish [baroccheggiante] arrangement like this one. It is a voice … [Berberian] … the voice, of course, is a slight parody of a singer … a type of English singer who is slightly drunk or tipsy, whichever you want. But it is a parody that brings one back to the manner of singing that I abhor. Berberian then performs “Ticket to Ride” as usual, amplifying the wild high notes and adding dainty hand gestures. For Berio, Berberian’s performance is a simulacrum of the Baroque, one he contrasts with “authentic” Monteverdi and Purcell, and with the purely gestural music it inspired in his Epifanie. For Berberian, the caricature had a more literal meaning: how not to sing Baroque music. Through parodying the Beatles, Berberian codified an alternative approach to singing early music. From the Beatles to Monteverdi Berberian’s Beatles explorations expanded her repertoire and musical network. Through Andriessen, she connected to the lively Dutch historical performance scene, the recorder player Frans Brüggen (1934–2014) in particular. Brüggen straddled musical worlds new and old—and Dutch and Italian; his contact with Berberian proved pivotal for both of their careers. Brüggen established his reputation playing Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi, recording for Telefunken, and concertizing internationally. Recognizing, like Vischer, that a more contemporary repertoire was essential to legitimizing his instrument, he commissioned challenging new works, including Andriessen’s

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  175 Sweet for recorders and tape (1964), and soon turned his attentions to Berio. That April, Andriessen wrote the first of many letters to Berio for Brüggen.66 In May 1965, Andriessen promised to bring Berio “a record of Frans with the 6 Telemannsonatas with a dedication to you as a present.”67 Andriessen and Brüggen’s persistence paid off: Berio’s Gesti (1966) for solo recorder, like Sequenza III (also 1966) for Berberian, was radical in its exploration of new sounds and extended techniques, and in its uncoupling of conventional breathing, tonguing, and fingering patterns. By programming Sweet and Gesti alongside early music by Sweelinck, Van Eyck, and Telemann, Brüggen promoted Andriessen and Berio among his fanbase. His admirers included Umberto Eco, himself an amateur recorder player.68 Brüggen had hoped to commission further music from Berio, including a piece for contrabass recorder and Berberian (likely unrealized).69 Nevertheless, Brüggen supported Berberian in other ways. In an April 1968 letter to Andriessen, Berberian reported that Brüggen had suggested she contact a Hamburg company which planned to record L’Orfeo.70 This was Telefunken/Decca, with whom Brüggen had worked since 1962, and as he was recording with Concentus Musicus in 1967– 1968, he could learn of Harnoncourt’s Monteverdi plans.71 Harnoncourt invited Berberian to perform La Messaggiera and Speranza, but she declined, fearing their Monteverdi interpretations would not correspond. Harnoncourt persisted, responding that, having listened to her recordings, he was certain that she could do it. She was surprised to learn later that the disc Harnoncourt had heard was not the avantgarde music she had imagined, but rather her Beatles album.72 It is ironic that Harnoncourt would be impressed by Berberian’s parody of a much-loathed “oratorio style.” She nonetheless crafted a different approach for her Orfeo performances. In Act II, where Silvia informs Orfeo that his bride Euridice has died, Berberian conveys her understanding of this scene’s dramatic importance through her timing and text declamation. She varies tempo, timbre, and vibrato speed, deftly executing the nota battuta (at “ahi ciel avaro”) and delivering the fatal “la tua diletta sposa … è morta” with an especially pale tone and only a hint of vibrato. Berberian contrasts markedly with the only commercially available recording of L’Orfeo at that time; Jeanne Deroubaix’s Messenger is metrical with uniform vibrato and tone color.73 L’Orfeo marked the beginning of Berberian’s Harnoncourt collaborations and more sustained Monteverdian engagements. In February 1970, she performed “Monteverdi in His Time” in Vienna with Concentus Musicus, including the madrigals La lettera amorosa (Se i languidi miei sguardi) and Con che soavità, and the Lamento d’Arianna (Lasciatemi morire).74 By 1972, they recorded excerpts from the eighth book of madrigals for German television.75 She then recorded the part of Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea under Harnoncourt.76 The scheming Ottavia, scorned wife of Emperor Nerone, is a more complex character than the innocent Silvia, which Berberian expresses through timbral changes, dramatic timing, and sensitivity to text, meter, and rhetoric. In “Disprezzata regina” (Act I, v), her accelerando on “Che fo, ove son, che penso?” conveys Ottavia’s anxiety and agitation, and she varies tone on both utterances of “delle donne miserabil sesso” (women, miserable sex). She delivers the monologue “Addio Roma” (Act III, vi) first with breathy

176  Kailan R. Rubinoff hesitation, then with the full-throated poignancy of leaving her homeland and being cast aside. Berberian is again strikingly different from the previous commercial recording, based on the edition of Raymond Leppard, whom Berberian criticized.77 Berberian’s Monteverdi performances are remarkably varied, suggesting she applied to early music the tenets of the “new vocality.” As she noted in 1981, The “new vocality” is the use of different styles, different vocal productions, another way to approach traditional music. I will explain: singing an entire program, Wagner, Fauré, Debussy, Schubert, with the same voice—that is what was the “old vocality.” Me, I try to find for each era, each composer, a different production, a different timbre. I have to sing Monteverdi with the voice of Monteverdi, Debussy with the voice of Debussy. And not only: some pieces of Debussy, the Fantoches for example, I would sing them in a certain way, and certain others, let’s take Bilitis, still differently. Stravinsky, like Picasso, has many periods and to pass from Verlaine’s poems to Shakespeare’s sonnets, one must absolutely change mentality and vocality. In the record Folk Songs [by Berio] there are eleven movements, and I sing with eight different styles.78 Berberian did not sing with one “Monteverdi voice”: her recordings demonstrate that she drew on the complexity of timbres she had mastered in contemporary music to express a full affective range in early music. Berberian also adapted to Monteverdi her experimental music practices of staging, gesture, and apparel. As she put it in 1966, “the New Vocality affirms that there should be singers who are able to act, sing, dance, mime, improvise—in other words, affect the eyes as well as the ears.”79 She especially emphasized the visual, including clothing and costumes,80 in performances of Lettera amorosa.81 Berberian railed against singers who performed it in excessively slow tempos and emphasized sound production.82 She employed a freer, recitative-like delivery, dramatized with gesture: I act, in the sense that if I’m going to sing Monteverdi’s La lettera amorosa, I come in singing it as if I were a woman who had just received a letter and who is reading it, aloud, you see. And I have a table, a Renaissance table and a Renaissance chair and I sit down and I get up. It’s not real theater and it’s not concert, it’s a combination.83 Episode 5 of C’è musica e musica opens with Lettera amorosa, and Berberian, accompanied by Berio on harpsichord, does just that: she enters the darkened space singing while reading a letter, dressed in a Renaissance-inspired costume.84 In her performance choices, Berberian blended her own ideas with Monteverdi’s instructions that the Lettera amorosa be performed “in a representational [dramatic] style, and sung without measure.”85 Berberian did act in full costume for Südwestrundfunk’s films of Ballo delle ingrate and Combattimento (1972).86 Her detailed sketches for costumes, puppetry,

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  177 and camerawork for Combattimento suggested she expected to have considerable input into its production.87 Combattimento was filmed in a historic palace with painted frescoes; the Concentus Musicus players and the narrator appear on stage in costume. Although her mask hides facial expressions until the end, Berberian gives a dynamic performance in the swordfight scene between Tancredi and Clorinda and is especially affecting during Clorinda’s final moments, when the camera focuses on her eyes. In Ballo, the role of Venus allowed her to interact further with other singers and hone her approach to movement, gesture, and text expression. Such smaller television productions with reduced performing forces accommodated the particularities of Berberian’s voice while giving her creative agency. Berberian’s Harnoncourt collaborations led her to fully appreciate Monteverdi’s music itself, not simply as a historical stepping-stone or vehicle for compositional experimentation. She did not profess interest in historical authenticity, instead charting an independent path. In September 1970, Berberian began to include Monteverdi’s works together with contemporary music on her solo recitals, a format that became her “From Monteverdi to the Beatles” program (some of which she recorded in 1971).88 She wanted to expose different sectors of her audience to unfamiliar music: “I give, to young people who do not know Monteverdi, Monteverdi. To middle-aged people, I give the Beatles, and that is not their genre. And I have to make them love it.”89 Berberian’s 1975 compilation album seems intended to draw her many younger fans to early music (Figure 11.3).90

Figure 11.3  Cover of Cathy Berberian Sings Claudio Monteverdi. Telefunken 6.41930, 1975. Courtesy of Warner Music UK, Ltd.

178  Kailan R. Rubinoff Berberian continued to perform Combattimento in modern arrangements alongside twentieth-century repertoire.91 The Lettera amorosa and Lamento della ninfa feature prominently in Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy), which she premiered in 1972. Nevertheless, Harnoncourt was her “ideal musician” for Monteverdi because of his interest in the music’s expressive qualities: We get along beautifully because we both believe in live performances of old music, of treating old music as it was at that time, contemporary music of that time, made for people, by people, by human beings instead of trying to imitate what we think perhaps the quality of voice was like, like thin, or reedy or whatever it is. Give the spirit of what that music was like. And that’s all that’s important.92 She was not concerned with his historical performance practices or supposed fidelity to the score. And Harnoncourt professed no interest in working with certain voice types, noting that, I’ve always been very afraid of vocal specialists. No one knows if people used to empty their veins before singing or if only those who had no personality [Temperament] sang. The voice is really the same instrument today as it was then.93 Harnoncourt was thus open to the possibilities that the unconventional Berberian presented. He developed his own theory of early Baroque music as “speaking music” through his reading of texts by Caccini and Monteverdi. As he understood Caccini, the text, often a dialogue, was basically set for one voice, with the rhythm and melody of speech being followed precisely and naturalistically. The only important consideration was to render the text as clearly as possible and with the greatest expressiveness.94 Berberian’s mastery of Italian allowed her to put Harnoncourt’s ideas into practice. Berberian did not discuss in interviews early singing techniques from treatises or other documents. In addition to studying the score and the text, she stressed knowing “the man or the woman who is behind the work” and their cultural environment by reading biographies and books on history, theatre, and fashion.95 Her extensive work with living composers surely encouraged her to continually adapt music to new audiences, performers, and environments and could only have imbued a healthy skepticism of Werktreue and the idea of faithfulness to “composers’ intentions.” Harnoncourt, in discussing Berberian, acknowledged her creative agency as a composer herself, concluding that “she had a natural way to understand extremely modern composers like Monteverdi.”96 Her distinctive approach (“it was not singing, it was not speaking, it was always changing from speaking to singing and

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  179 from singing to speaking”) was for the time “really revolutionary. It was avantgarde.” Harnoncourt’s choice of wording—the linking of Berberian, Monteverdi, and the avant garde—shows the proximity of these worlds in the minds of 1960s practitioners. Harnoncourt implies that as a composer (one connected to other composers), Berberian had unique insights into interpreting Monteverdi, who was himself an “extremely modern composer” representing the seventeenth-century avant garde. The idea of Monteverdi as vanguard is common in Harnoncourt’s writing.97 Harnoncourt makes another point about Berberian: She was highly professional. So she didn’t like if the preparation was not professional. This is very natural, it’s not complicated. And at the same time, she was so youthful [and] enthusiastic. So this mixture of highest professionality and enthusiasm is very seldom [seen].98 Harnoncourt, highlighting Berberian’s exacting standards, draws attention to historical performers’ longstanding anxieties about amateurism and technical shortcomings.99 Proficient in singing extremely complex music, Berberian helped Harnoncourt’s Monteverdi projects to be taken seriously by mainstream critics and would-be skeptics of historical performance: HIP’s avant-garde associations served as legitimation. Moreover, the idea of Monteverdi as leader of a seventeenth-century musical revolution also resonated with post-War experimentalists, who saw—in the recitar cantando style of Caccini, the harmonic boldness of the seconda pratica, the gestural language of Monteverdi, or the chromaticism of Gesualdo—justifications for their own (post)modernist challenges to tonality, dodecaphony, or other compositional conventions. For both contemporary and historical performers, the blending of these worlds was critical to the ethos—and survival—of both. Especially intense confrontations between new and historical musics took place at European festivals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, venues where Berberian could draw mixed audiences. At the English Bach Festival, where Berberian appeared in 1969 and 1971, her performances of Stripsody and works by Berio, Rands, and Stravinsky contrasted markedly with Baroque programs by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and other early music ensembles.100 The Holland Festival was an especially fertile ground for such juxtapositions.101 Berberian headlined the 1977 Festival, starring in a television broadcast, leading a masterclass, and débuting her VocaLectuRecital of music from “cavemen to Berio.”102 According to reviews, the program included medieval music (Gregorian chant and troubadour songs); excerpts from Ockeghem, Dowland, Monteverdi, and Schubert; twentieth-century works; and demonstrations of castrato and bel canto singing.103 This marked a rare (and possibly the first) occasion where Berberian ventured into pre1600 music, if only as part of a pastiche. Brüggen’s Holland Festival appearances were likewise provocative; he performed in HIP ensembles and contemporary works by Andriessen and others in the Dutch vanguard.104 Through their virtuosity and flexibility, Brüggen and Berberian could bring their fanbase along to try something old, unfamiliar, or outlandish.

180  Kailan R. Rubinoff Epilogue: The Legacy of Berberian’s Early Music Vocality Although Berberian is best known as a contemporary music interpreter, her forays into early repertoires impacted her career, the composers in her circle, and HIP. Her Monteverdi recordings expanded her audiences beyond experimental music specialists. Working with Harnoncourt, Berberian discovered Monteverdi’s music on her own terms and developed her approach to singing it. She then gave voice to Monteverdi’s memorable female characters through impassioned and skillful performances. Berberian’s Monteverdi interests stimulated her further research into early music in the late 1970s, beyond her VocaLectuRecital. In 1978, Berberian discussed a program of then little-known women composers and musicians, such as Comtessa de Dia, Mary Stuart, and Anne Boleyn.105 She envisioned another recital with works by Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and Alma Mahler,106 and an anthology published with Schirmer.107 Sadly, these projects were left unrealized. By the late 1970s, Berberian suffered from heart problems and eye troubles; although blind by 1980, she continued to perform until her death in 1983. Nearly completely absent in Berberian’s early music explorations, however, is music by J. S. Bach, or Telemann and Handel, the core repertoire of Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, Brüggen, and other historical performers with whom Berberian associated.108 Bach likewise preoccupied Stravinsky, Andriessen, and Berio.109 Berberian’s lack of engagement with Bach may reflect her dislike of singing in German110 and of sacred music.111 She may also have perceived that Bach’s works allowed for less creative input. As Umberto Eco argues, a classical composition, whether it be a Bach fugue, Verdi’s Aïda, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, posits an assemblage of sound units which the composer arranged in a closed, well-defined manner before presenting it to the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the composer himself.112 Eco contrasts such compositions with works by Stockhausen, Berio, Pousseur, and Boulez, which “reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements” and “appeal to the initiative of the individual performer.” Berio, Maderna, Berberian, and others in her circle surely understood that such contemporary “open works” share an affinity with Monteverdi’s less determinate musical scores. During an intensely productive period for contemporary specialists and historical performers, Berberian’s experiments with seventeenth-century ornamentation demonstrated to Berio the possibilities of the voice. Her “new vocality” also impressed Louis Andriessen, convincing him of the expressive potential of alternative singing styles.113 Berio and Andriessen’s collaborations with Brüggen transformed contemporary attitudes toward the recorder, spurring others to write innovative works for historical instruments.

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  181 For the historical performance movement, Berberian’s most direct impact was on her colleagues and students: Carol Plantamura, Candace Smith, Marco Beasley, and Jennifer Paull have followed her example of performing both contemporary and early musics,114 as have subsequent generations. Through her masterclasses in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, Berberian reached many others.115 Berberian’s influence on the early music world was also indirect. Her Monteverdi recordings opened peoples’ eyes, ears, and minds to unorthodox interpretations. In 1972, Berberian complained about a then-current way of singing Monteverdi: It’s an over-reverent approach that deprives, that makes it cerebral: the voce fissa, the voce bianca kind of technique … Everyone does Monteverdi as if it were church music and Monteverdi was first of all an Italian, which is already saying a great deal, and on top of that [living] in the early Baroque, which was a pretty lusty era for men and for music.116 Berberian’s intuition about the “lusty” early Baroque was prescient, prefiguring by some two decades a turn toward analyzing gender dynamics, sexuality, and embodiment in Monteverdi scholarship.117 Moreover, her insight that in Monteverdi’s time “most of the composers were singers, and most of the singers were composers” helped to restore the performer as creative partner.118 By pointing out the limitations of early music specialists and operatic singers, and in demonstrating different expressive capabilities, she indicated a path for later researchers to uncover the techniques of seventeenth-century Italian singers.119 Her comment about voce bianca also resonates with current discussions about the “whiteness” of HIP singing and attempts to diversify the musicians and sounds of the historical performance world today.120 It is unfortunate that Berberian did not live to see HIP expand its share of the classical music marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s—a success to which she herself contributed. Given her collaborations with leading historical performers, her performances on landmark recordings, and her role in popularizing Monteverdi, it is striking that Berberian does not factor into scholarship on the twentieth-century early music revival.121 Such accounts tend to emphasize stories of “great” male performers and conductors. Her absence suggests that Berberian forced early music fans and practitioners to confront uncomfortable truths: that the quest for historical authenticity in performance is a mirage, and that HIP reflects the aesthetic values of our own time.122 In drawing attention to Berberian, I aim to contribute to a more inclusive historiography of HIP, one that re-centers the transformational work of women practitioners, many of whom operated outside of the spotlight and off the conductor’s podium.123 Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge UNCG’s Dean’s Research and Creativity Fund, Regular Faculty, Faculty First, and Kohler Fund programs which supported research travel to the Paul Sacher Stiftung (PSS), Basel, Switzerland.

182  Kailan R. Rubinoff Notes 1 Thomas Forrest Kelly, Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103, referencing Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien, Claudio Monteverdi: L’Orfeo (Telefunken SKH 21, 1969). 2 Denis Morrier, “Monteverdisques,” Diapason (June 2014): 31–33; George W. Loomis, “Monteverdi’s Orfeo,” American Record Guide (November 1993): 153– 154. 3 William R. Braun, “Monteverdi,” Opera News (February 2015): 54–55, reviewing Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien, Monteverdi, 9 CDs (Warner Classics 825646314829, 2014). 4 Ian Woodward, “Avant-Garde’s Queen Bee,” Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 1970. 5 Marie Christine Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 361–365; a discography is at https://www​.discogs​.com​/artist​/177340​-Cathy​-Berberian (accessed July 25, 2022). 6 Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 161–163; Kate Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice: Cathy Berberian as Collaborator, Composer and Creator” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 2011), 173–174. 7 Cathy Berberian, “The New Vocality in Contemporary Music (1966),” trans. Francesca Placanica, in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, ed. Pamela Karantonis, Francesca Placanica, and Pieter Verstraete (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 47–49; Placanica, “‘La nuova vocalità nell’opera contemporanea’ (1966): Cathy Berberian’s Legacy,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 51–66. The term “new vocality” was coined jointly by Berberian and Berio. 8 Letters to Stein and Andriessen (1966) cited in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 207. 9 Grazia Livi, “Cathy Berberian ha almeno dieci voci,” Il Mondo, November 23, 1972, 16–17. 10 See Pamela Karantonis and Pieter Verstraete, “Introduction/Overture,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 3–18, and other contributions in that volume. 11 Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice”; Francesca Placanica, “‘Unwrapping the Voice’: Cathy Berberian and John Cage’s Aria (1958),” in Transformations of Musical Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 264–278; Placanica, “Recital I (for Cathy): A Drama ‘Through the Voice,’” Twentieth-Century Music 15, no. 3 (October 2018): 359–397. 12 Thomas Otto and Stefan Piendl, Erst mal schön ins Horn tuten: Erinnerungen eines Schallplattenproduzenten (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2007), 15, 18–39. 13 Kailan R. Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings: Early Music and ‘1968,’” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237–254. 14 Biographical information summarizes Meehan, “‘Not Just a Pretty Voice,’” 13–20; David Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator: The Work of Cathy Berberian 1958– 1966,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 19–31. 15 Elizabeth L. Keathley, “Schönberg’s French Connection: Marya Freund, Pierrot lunaire, and Schönberg in Paris,” Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center 13 (2016): 227–247. 16 Carrie de Swaan, “Cathy Berberian: Muziek is mijn adem/Music Is the Air I Breathe” (1994), http://www​.swaanprodukties​.nl​/web​/index​.php​?p​=3​&project​=35 (accessed November 22, 2022) at 2:47. 17 Meehan, “‘Not Just a Pretty Voice,’” 17–18. 18 Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator,” 19; David Osmond-Smith, with Talia Pecker Berio, “Two Fragments of ‘The Music of Luciano Berio,’” Twentieth-Century Music 9, no. 1–2 (March 2012): 49–53.

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  183 19 Maud Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy, 1968– 1983 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 38–41. 20 Osmond-Smith, “Two Fragments,” 54; Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 56–60. 21 Meehan, “‘Not Just a Pretty Voice,’” 30–31; Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 64–65. 22 Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 61–66. 23 Meehan, “‘Not Just a Pretty Voice,’” 28–33; Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator,” 20–21. 24 Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator,” 21–22; Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 64; 57–71. Berberian and Eco collaborated on later translation projects. 25 Placanica, “‘Unwrapping the Voice,’” 270–271. 26 Motomi Tsugami, “What Incited the ‘Monteverdi Renaissance’?” in Musicology and Globalization, ed. Yoshio Tozawa and Nihon Ongaku Gakkai (Tokyo: Musicological Society of Japan, 2004), 184–188; Iain Fenlon, “Malipiero, Monteverdi, Mussolini and Musicology,” in Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr’s Seventieth Birthday, ed. Alison Latham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 241–255; Andrew Dell’Antonio, “Il Divino Claudio: Monteverdi and Lyric Nostalgia in Fascist Italy,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 3 (1996): 271–284. 27 Osmond-Smith, “Two Fragments,” 44–54; Mario Baroni and Rossana Dalmonte, “Notizie sulla vita di Bruno Maderna,” in Bruno Maderna: documenti, ed. Mario Baroni and Rossana Dalmonte (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 1985), 7–69. 28 Annibale Cetrangolo, “Bruno Maderna, Gian Francesco Malipiero e Il Divino Claudio,” in Malipiero Maderna 1973–1993, ed. Paolo Cattelan (Florence: Olschki, 2000), 207–228. 29 Maderna, Documenti, 73. 30 On this performance of Poppea, see s.n. [Description of Bruno Maderna’s 1967 performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea], https://leylagencer​ .blogspot​.com​/2015​/10​/lincoronazione​-di​-poppea​.html (accessed March 11, 2022). Maderna’s Amsterdam edition was published as Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo: favola pastorale in due parti, new realization and elaboration by Bruno Maderna (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1967). 31 Orchestra dell’Angelicum di Milano, Suite dalla “The fairy queen”(La Regina delle Fate), Odhecaton di Ottaviano Petrucci, Altenglische Violentänze (Angelicum LPA970, 1956). Maderna previously conducted Purcell with Angelicum in 1942 (Maderna, Documenti, 73). 32 Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator,” 22; Irna Priore, “The Origins of Incontri Musicali,” Theoria 21 (2014): 7–26. I fondly remember Priore (1963–2014), my late UNCG colleague. 33 Stein, Berio, and Berberian correspondence (1960), cited in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 224–225. 34 Dorothy L. Crawford, Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 186–188 and 268–280. Morton, Stravinsky, and Robert Craft programmed Bach, Gesualdo, Monteverdi et al., with Luzzaschi an interest of Aldous Huxley. 35 Giulio Cesare Paribeni, La storia e la teoria dell’antica musica greca (Milan: Sonzogno, 1937); Giulio Cesare Paribeni, preface to Collana di composizioni polifoniche vocali, ed. Achille Schinelli (Milan: Curci, 1955). 36 Luciano Berio, “[Giorgio Federico Ghedini],” in Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis with introduction by Giorgio Pestelli (Turin: Einaudi, 2013), 344–346. 37 Federico Lazzaro, “I meccanismi recettivi della musica antica nelle trascrizioni novecentesche dell’Orfeo di Monteverdi,” Il Saggiatore Musicale 17, no. 2 (2010): 220–222. 38 Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 213 (citing Cathy Berberian, “La Musique et les jours,” France Culture (January 3, 1977).

184  Kailan R. Rubinoff 39 Bálint András Varga, “Cathy Berberian 1925–83,” in From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 162. 40 Epifanie (1959–1961) interpolated the orchestral Quaderni I, II, III with six movements on texts by Proust, Joyce, Machado, Sanguineti, Simon, and Brecht. See Rossana Dalmonte and Loris Azzaroni, “Struttura latente e struttura manifesta: Contributi per un’analisi di Epifanie,” in Il gesto della forma. Musica, poesia, teatro nell’opera di Luciano Berio, ed. Rossana Dalmonte (Milan: Arcadia, 1981), 45–141. 41 See explanations of trillo and ribattuta di gola in Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musiche (Florence: Marescotti, 1602). 42 Osmond-Smith, “The Tenth Oscillator,” 26 and David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 63–64; Luciano Berio, Two Interviews with Rossana Dalmonte and Bálint András Varga, trans. and ed. David Osmond-Smith (New York: Boyars, 1985), 146. 43 Berio’s 1965 version appeared as Epifanie (1959–61) (London: Universal Edition 13217, 1969) and Luciano Berio, director, and Cathy Berberian, La Nuova Musica 3, Orchestra RAI di Roma, recorded 1969 (Stradivarius 10017, 1989); it was revised again as Epiphanies (London: Universal Edition 30519, 1992). Bar numbers refer to the 1992 score. Berberian, noting the year 1963 above, may be mistaken or referring to revisions. 44 Luciano Berio, interview 1 with Varga, 148. Berberian suggested this effect (at 16:16 in the recording) was inspired by a bird she and Berio had heard at Tanglewood (Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 123). 45 Berio and Berberian make these connections explicit in the 1972 television show C’è musica e musica, episode five (“Mille e una voce”), https://www​.raiplay​.it​/video​ /2018​/06​/C​-E​-MUSICA​-E​-MUSICA​-421d8022​-e7de​-4ad4​-ae68​-dac52f703d99​.html (accessed April 28, 2022). Berio’s voiceovers discuss vocal gesture; Berberian sings note battute in Lettera amorosa (on “il cor stillai,” 0:43) and in Epifanie (on “bird,” 9:23). 46 In 1967 Berio directed Combattimento in Cambridge, MA, informing his “Problems of Musical Theatre” and “Del gesto vocale,” Scritti sulla musica, 42–70, 425–432, 505 (some passages appear in C’è musica e musica). See also Marco Uvietta, “Gesto, intenzionalità, indeterminazione nella poetica di Berio fra il 1956 e il 1966,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 46 (January 2011): 196–243. 47 Martin Kirnbauer, “‘…Toutes écrites pour la mécène’: Antoinette Vischer und ihr modernes Cembalo,” in “Entre Denges et Denezy…”: Dokumente zur Schweizer Musikgeschichte 1900–2000, ed. Ulrich Mosch and Matthias Kassel (Mainz: Schott, 2000), 96–105. 48 Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 156. Luciano Berio, Rounds with Voice, on Das moderne Cembalo der Antoinette Vischer (Wergo WER 60 028, 1967), was reworked for harpsichord solo. 49 Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 201. 50 Howard Klein, “Cathy Berberian Sings Cage Music,” New York Times, October 26, 1966, 41. Berberian also sang four Purcellian arrangements on BBC television (letters to Andriessen and Stein cited in Kate Meehan, “Beatles Arias: Cathy Berberian Sings the Beatles,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 169–182). All Beatles songs discussed below are credited to Lennon–McCartney, copyright Sony/ ATV Music Publishing LLC. 51 Issued as Beatles Arias (Fontana 680.279, 1966; Philips 885 524 PY; Polydor 583702) and Revolution: An Operatic First by Madame Cathy Berberian (Fontana MGF 27564, 1967). 52 E.g., Joshua Rifkin and Ned Rorem (Meehan, “Beatles Arias,” 170–173), and Berio, “Commenti al rock (1967),” in Scritti sulla musica, 108–120. 53 Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings,” 246.

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  185 54 Berberian, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, Ode to Gravity, KPFA (1 November 1972), accessed 5 October 2021, http://archive​.org​/details​/CBerberianOTG, at 24:17. 55 Anne Sivuoja-Kauppala, “Cathy Berberian’s Notes on Camp,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 123. 56 On Andriessen’s unpublished “4 Beatle-liedjes” (“Yesterday,” “You’ve Got to Hide My [sic] Love Away,” “Michelle,” and “Ticket to Ride”) see Meehan, “Beatles Arias.” Berberian recorded “Ticket to Ride” for MagnifiCathy (Wergo 60054, 1971) and appears with others on posthumous albums (e.g., Telescopic CD-PIC 11, 2004). On Berberian, Andriessen, and his partner Jeanette Yanikian’s friendship, see Maja Trochimczyk, ed., The Music of Louis Andriessen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16–17; Louis Andriessen, The Art of Stealing Time, ed. Mirjam Zegers, trans. Clare Yates (Todmorden: Arc, 2002), 33, 39. 57 Yayoi Uno Everett, The Music of Louis Andriessen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45–64; Robert Adlington, “‘A Sort of Guerrilla’: Che at the Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19, no. 2 (July 2007): 167–193. 58 Meehan, “Beatles Arias,” 173–174. 59 De Swaan, Cathy Berberian, 32:33–33:42 (possibly from a 1967 VARA broadcast). Both Boyer and Andriessen arrangements include “fa-la-la” passagework. See Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 288, on the “Dylan period.” 60 At ca. 1:06 in the MagnifiCathy recording (see note 56 above). In the Beatles’ original, the B section is more rhythmically active, but Andriessen’s “recitative” instead suspends time. 61 Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian, 24:28; “Cathy’s Songbook” (1977), Dutch television broadcast, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=WLqVioiDldc​&list​ =RDWLqVioiDldc​&start​_radio=1 (accessed May 9, 2022). 62 Meehan, “Beatles Arias,” 175–176; “Michelle 2” evokes later styles. Berio’s versions were published as Beatles Songs (London: Universal Edition 33098, 1967) and recorded by Sophia Burgos with the Basler Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Ivor Bolton, Transformation (Sony Classical 19075982072, 2019). 63 Brüggen recorded these works on albums likely given to Berio (see below). Frans Brüggen, The Virtuoso Recorder (Decca 10049, 1962) includes the Canonic Sonata in D Minor, TWV 40:121; Frans Brüggen, Sechs Sonaten für Blockflöte und B.C. (Telefunken SAWT 9435-B, 1963) includes the Canonic Sonata in B-flat major, TWV 41:B3, which shares the same key signature as “Michelle 1.” 64 Cf. Brüggen, Gustav Leonhardt, and Anner Bijlsma, Handel: Sechs Sonaten für Blockflöte und Basso Continuo (Telefunken SAWT 9421, 1962). 65 See note 45 above. This passage appears ca. 3:30–6:32. 66 Andriessen to Berio, April 12, 1964, and May 3, 1964, Berio collection, PSS, MF 250.1. 67 Andriessen to Berio, May 19, 1965 (follow-up on July 31, 1965), Berio collection, PSS. 68 Brüggen factors in Eco, “How Not to Talk about Soccer” (1990) in How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), 39–42. 69 Brüggen to Berio, July 8, 1967, Berio collection, PSS. Brüggen and Berio remained friendly; Brüggen purchased Berio’s Lingueglietta summer home, and Berio lent an endorsement to the publicity materials for Brüggen’s Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. 70 Berberian to Andriessen [April 19, 1968], Berberian collection, PSS. 71 Otto and Piendl, Erst mal schön ins Horn tuten, 131–132. Brüggen and Concentus Musicus recorded Telemann suites (Frans Brüggen and Concentus Music Wien, Georg Philipp Telemann: Suite in F minor/Recorder Suite in A minor, Telefunken

186  Kailan R. Rubinoff

72 73 74

75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91

92

SAWT 9507-A, 1967), Vivaldi concerti (Frans Brüggen and Concentus Musicus, Antonio Vivaldi: Concerti a cinque, a quattro, a tre, Teldec SAWT 9528-A, 1968), and Blockflötenkonzerte (Frans Brüggen and Concentus Musicus, Blockflötenkonzerte/ Recorder Concertos, Telefunken, SAWT 9533-B, 1968). Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 213–217, citing Berberian, France Culture, La Musique et les jours, January 3, 1977. Monteverdi, L’Orfeo, directed by August Wenzinger (Archive ARC 3036, 1956). Like Berberian, Deroubaix sang early and contemporary musics, performing with Stafford Cape’s Pro Musica Antiqua, and in Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez premieres. Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 227 and Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 221. Recordings appear on Cathy Berberian Sings Claudio Monteverdi (Telefunken 6.41930, 1975), with L’Orfeo and Poppea excerpts; a clip from Lamento d’Ariana is in De Swaan, Cathy Berberian, 53:48. Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian, 41:16. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Claudio Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea, Telefunken 6.35247, 1974. John Pritchard, director, Monteverdi: L’incoronazione di Poppea (Angel Records BL-3644; HMV SAN 126-7, 1964). On Raymond Leppard see “Special Transcript: Cathy’s Solo Talk Show,” transcription by Pamela Karantonis, in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 33–44. “Cant’actrice” [interview with Berberian], Des femmes en mouvements, no. 64 (October 30, 1981): 28–30. Berberian, “The New Vocality,” 49. Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 132–144. Recordings include MagnifiCathy (Wergo WER 60054, 1971) and Cathy Berberian Sings Claudio Monteverdi; excerpts in C’è musica e musica episode 5 and Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy) (RCA 09026 62540 2, 1972; 886445148794, CD). See summary in Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 222–223. Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian, 18:29–52. Sewn in 1908 by a Parisian tailor, this ruffled black and pink dress was her standard Monteverdi outfit (Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 229–230; Livi, “Cathy Berberian ha almeno dieci voci,” 17). Claudio Monteverdi, Settimo Libro de Madrigali (Venice: Bartolomeo Magni, 1619), 17. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Wir sind eine Entdeckergemeinschaft: Aufzeichnungen zur Entstehung des Concentus Musicus, ed. Alice Harnoncourt (Salzburg: Residenz, 2017), 102–103; see Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Cathy Berberian, Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=psZLgoCe8K4 (accessed May 17, 2022) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Cathy Berberian, Claudio Monteverdi: Il ballo delle ingrate https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=DEt6JkTnu30 (accessed May 17, 2022). Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 228–229. It is unclear if these plans were intended for the SWR production. MagnifiCathy (WER 60054, 1971) includes Lettera amorosa and works by Debussy, Cage, Bussotti, Weill, Gershwin, Berberian, and “Ticket to Ride.” Cathy Berberian, “Cant’actrice” [interview with Cathy Berberian], Des femmes en mouvements, no. 64 (October 30, 1981): 30. Cathy Berberian Sings Claudio Monteverdi. These included performances in Siena (August 27, 1970, London Sinfoniettea, directed by Berio) and Turin (March 14, 1979, Gruppo musica insieme di Cremona, directed by Giorgio Bernasconi). See Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 236–237, 299, 307. Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian, 43:23.

The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian  187 93 Cited in Monika Mertl, Vom Denken des Herzens: Alice und Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Salzburg: Residenz, 1999), 192. 94 Harnoncourt, “Origin and Development of Music as Speech (Klangrede),” in Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, trans. Reinhard G. Pauly (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1988), 129–136. 95 Berberian, “Cant’actrice, 31, and Berberian, “Special Transcript: Cathy’s Solo Talk Show,” 42. 96 De Swaan, Cathy Berberian, 54:29–56:40; partial transcription in Placanica, “La nuova vocalità,” 60. 97 Harnoncourt, “Origin and Development,” 129–131. 98 De Swaan; Harnoncourt recalled Berberian’s “highest perfection and musical-technical sophistication” in Wir sind eine Entdeckergemeinschaft, 89. 99 See, for example, Harry Haskell, The Early Music Revival: A History, new edition (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996), 58–59; 166–169; Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” Musical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (1983): at 317; and note 13 above. 100 Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 136 and 301; British Library, English Bach Festival programs (ZC.9.d.490). 101 Jessica Voeten, Een Nederlands wonder: vijftig jaar Holland Festival (Amsterdam: Walburg, 1997), 92–93. Period-instrument ensembles appear from 1959; Berberian performed in 1969, 1972, 1974, and 1977. 102 Recitals in The Hague (June 8) and Amsterdam (June 10); press summaries in Voeten, Een Nederlands wonder, 108–109, 201. 103 Reviews in NRC Handelsblad (June 9), Vrije Volk (June 9), Telegraaf (June 10), Volkskrant (June 10), Parool (June 11). 104 See Voeten for programs; on Brüggen’s role in Andriessen et al.’s Reconstructie (1969), see Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings,” 247. 105 Berberian, “Cant’actrice,” Des femmes en mouvements (March 1978), 78. 106 Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 263–265. 107 Candace Smith, “My Five Years with Cathy Berberian,” in Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality, 213–217. 108 Berberian’s few Bach performances include some choral works as an adolescent and a recording of parts from Christus lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4, for “Cathy’s Talk Show” (Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 36). Geraldine Farrar’s Supplication ([Bach] Air on the G String) appeared in her “Second Hand Songs” recital (Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 260). 109 Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75, excerpted in Berio’s Recital I, is an anomaly in that it did not factor in Berberian’s repertoire. See David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 219. 110 Berberian noted her German was “rather weak.” Letter to Dieter Schnebel (1965), in Meehan, “Not Just a Pretty Voice,” 236. 111 Berberian declined invitations to sing Monteverdi and Purcell’s sacred works (Vila, Cathy Berberian cant’actrice, 300–301). 112 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 48. The essay first appeared in Incontri Musicali (1959). 113 Maya Trochymzik, ed., The Music of Louis Andriessen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 168–170. 114 Smith, “My Five Years with Cathy Berberian,” Jolande van der Klis, Een tuitje in de aardkorst: Kroniek van de oude muziek 1976–2006 (Kampen: Kok, 2007), 234; Marco Beasley, interview with Pamela Hickman, February 12, 2015, http://pam​ elah​ickm​ansm​usic​inte​rviews​.blogspot​.com​/2015​/02​/talking​-to​-italian​-tenor​-marco​

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115

116 117 118 119

120 121

122 123

-beasley​.html; Jennifer Paull, Cathy Berberian and Music’s Muses (Vouvry: Amoris, 2007). Smith, “My Five Years with Cathy Berberian,” mentions a Basel masterclass for Andrea von Ramm’s students. This four-day course, which Von Ramm organized independently of the Schola Cantorum administration, took place in early December 1977. See Sterling Scott Jones, “The Story of an Early Music Quartet (Studio der frühen Musik)” (Munich: Self-published, 2005), 137–138. Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian, 5:14ff. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Monteverdi Studies and ‘New’ Musicologies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, ed. John Whenham and Richard Wistreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 249–260. Berberian, interview with Amirkhanian. Edward Foreman, The Art of Bel Canto in the Italian Baroque: A Study of the Original Sources (Minneapolis, MN: Pro Musica, 2006); Richard Wistreich, “‘La voce è grata assai, ma …’: Monteverdi on Singing,” Early Music 22, no. 1 (February 1994): 7–19 and Richard Wistreich, “Reconstructing Pre-Romantic Singing Technique,” in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. John Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178–191. Melanie L. Marshall, “Voce Bianca: Purity and Whiteness in British Early Music Vocality,” Women and Music 19, no. 1 (2015): 36–44. Haskell, The Early Music Revival; John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lawson and Stowell, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). This point was forcefully argued by Richard Taruskin in “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 90–154. See, for example, Anne Smith, Ina Lohr (1903–1983): Transcending the Boundaries of Early Music (Basel: Schwabe, 2020); Mimi Mitchell, “Meer dan authentiek: Het muzikale leven van Marie Leonhardt-Amsler,” Tijdschrift oude muziek 29, no. 1 (February 2014): 44–49.

12 The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects Victoria Aschheim

In 1999, the Dresden Festival commissioned a work for Concerto Köln from the co-founders of Bang on a Can, the composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe. On the surface, it was a curious pairing. Concerto Köln is a Baroque orchestra that performs on original instruments, some of which the musicians find in outdoor markets and restore. As the musicians told Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe, “all the composers they work with had been dead for two hundred years.”1 It was also an auspicious pairing, though, as both groups are collectives, used to shared decision making. And so, in March 2000, in their studio in Cologne, Concerto Köln sat down in a circle with three American artists on the experimental vanguard and planned new music.2 Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe believe that what is “beautiful about a Baroque orchestra on original instruments is they are fighting very, very hard to keep something alive which is old, to keep something alive which is in the process of being lost.” So the composers decided to write a piece about “the struggle to remember things as they disappear, and to honor some of the things which have already gone.”3 The result was a hybrid of music, text, and theater: Lost Objects, an oratorio for soprano, two countertenors, chamber chorus; Baroque orchestra, comprised of first and second violins, violas, cellos, double basses, flutes, oboes, bassoon, horns, trumpets, timpani, and harpsichord; and the Bang on a Can ensemble, comprised of electric guitar, electric bass, sampling keyboard, drums, and electric percussion.4 All the instruments are tuned to a' = 415 Hz (lower than the modern standards of a' = 440 Hz or higher).5 The composers engaged their friend, the writer Deborah Artman, to craft the libretto, and together they alighted on a tractate of the Talmud, Bava Metzia, for the kernel of the text. The tractate details the responsibilities of those who find lost objects.6 Lost Objects is aerodynamic: propulsive, with a compact text and a strong rhythmic frame that lifts the audience into watchfulness and contemplation. Listening to the oratorio is like reading a great, communal clock that tracks many different rates of passing time, all at once. Yet, as preparatory documents from Lang’s personal archive (to which he afforded me access) reveal, the patterns of the score and text carry immense theoretical freight. Lang, for all his plainspokenness, embraced the words “philosophy” and “philosophical” during the creative process, invoking them while emailing with his German partners.7 The composers also had high and, in some cases, unrealized ambitions for artistic unity and multimedia experience. DOI:  10.4324/9781003300229-16

190  Victoria Aschheim Principal among the commitments the composers made in conceiving Lost Objects is that the work—and the genre of the oratorio itself—would serve as a vehicle for “confrontation”: between old and new, and between lost and found.8 Forms of the word “confront” pepper Lang’s prose. The movements of Lost Objects are modal explorations driven by rhythmic repetition, true to the composers’ postminimalist signature. The expansive breadth of the music—its meditative stretching both horizontally and vertically—provides space for the confrontation of objects and memories that occupy drastically different registers, from the mundane to the metaphysical. Confrontations happen, too, among the timbres of Lost Objects: choral voices—crisp and unornamented—meet electronic amplification; woodwinds and strings mesh with the electric guitar’s metallic twangs. I wish to develop this motif of confrontation within the world of Lost Objects, leaning into its social possibilities—its meanings that extend past the limits of form. I suggest that confrontation in Lost Objects, whether cultural, stylistic, technological, or syntactical, presents an occasion for measuring the civic potential of contact between creators of early and new music. Proximity, alterity, juxtaposition: these are sonic conditions for confrontation in Lost Objects. But beyond the bounds of the composition, these conditions spark dialogue between early and new music. Such dialogue is, at heart, a project of finding difference and solidarity. Confrontation: The Composers’ Conception In early July 1999, Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe crafted what they called a “proposal” encapsulating their vision for the commission.9 Since it was created in an older version of Microsoft Word, only the raw text can be read. This archival circumstance is itself a reminder of the observation, and the challenge, at the center of Lost Objects. As Lang puts it, “Things become obsolete, things disappear; it is a struggle to hold onto the places where we have been. Lost Objects is about that struggle.”10 This concept of “struggle” holds fraught energy, a feeling of friction and obligation, that reflects the moral charge of “confrontation.” To come face to face with loss, and to acknowledge the fragility of memory, is difficult.11 Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe framed Lost Objects as another kind of face-to-face meeting: a cross-cultural convergence around shared musical values. They wrote: LOST OBJECTS grew out of a series of discussions held among the composers and directors of Bang on a Can, a cutting-edge, American music organization, and the directors of a respected German classical music Festival, a flexible chorus in the European choral tradition, and a specialized orchestra dedicated to music from the European Baroque. In other words, people equally accomplished but from very different parts of the music world came together to see what, if any, common ground existed which could unite them all. Together these participants identified certain problems that all hoped a joint project might address: the limitations of the existing repertoire of a baroque orchestra, and its traditionally conservative audience for classical music

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  191 the lack of connections between the classical music audience and the more vibrant audiences that support other kinds of music, and that support contemporary art and theater the physical confinement of the concert environment the inability of the concert world to incorporate new technologies.12 The composers then expanded on their concept of the Baroque orchestra. “It is necessary to create a new kind of music for an old environment,” they wrote. We no longer live in the same kind of civilization or think the same kinds of thoughts that made Baroque music possible. Classical music in general, and the Baroque orchestra in specific, is a lost object. If musical institutions are going to keep from becoming museums, they must refresh themselves with new music and new musical ideas. Their imagined solution to the problem of classical music audiences’ narrow vantage involved reaching out to audiences of other art forms. They felt it was important “to create a project that can build a bridge to audiences already interested in other, more radical arts.” “Theater, art, literature and film audiences,” they maintained, “are already much more committed to seeing their art forms challenged by new work.” The composers thought they would design Lost Objects to feature “a strong contemporary art component.” In contrast to the “traditional classical music audience,” they found people “interested in contemporary art” to be “in search of what is fresh.”13 Behind these convictions of Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe is a spirit of critique— restless resistance to an institutional status quo. The composers had planned to mount an exhibition of contemporary art to run concurrently with the performance. Lang had corresponded with the curator Laura Hoptman (then-assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art), who recommended a list of artists whose work she felt would complement Lost Objects, but the archival record does not indicate that the exhibition took place.14 In addition to using the Talmud as a source for the libretto, the composers also projected that they would draw text from responses to a questionnaire they would create. It would be distributed to “a large number of participants, from different countries and different walks of life,” including the “international artists” whom they hoped would appear in the exhibition. According to the proposal, the questionnaire would have asked: “1. Please relate a personal story about something you have lost,” and “2. Please relate a personal story about something you have found.”15 The questionnaire method expresses a democratic aspiration, a craving for community input. Perhaps wide distribution of the questionnaire would have brought the composers that much closer to realizing a dream of inclusivity, with the mingling of a constituency they assembled. Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe imagined, Some of these answers will be about common, ordinary objects, and some will be about deeper, more philosophical experiences. Both the mundane

192  Victoria Aschheim answers and the philosophical answers are equally valid. The text will be drawn from these answers, not necessarily setting entire answers but perhaps just a few lines, or words. They went so far as to propose that “perhaps all the questionnaires—those set and unset—could be gathered in a LOST OBJECTS book, or posted on a LOST OBJECTS website.” A “sample answer” Lang himself provided to the questionnaire read: 1. My mother was born in Germany. When things became bad for Jews her family had to leave. She was just a young girl. When I was young she wrote down for me the address of her home in Germany. And I lost it.16 Lang’s record of correspondence from the time does not contain further details on the implementation of the questionnaire. Yet the instinct for relatable and perhaps jarring juxtapositions of the world-historical and the quotidian would continue to fuel Lost Objects. One significant trace of the composers’ early intentions present in the final version of Lost Objects is the admixture of old and new technology. Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe pointed out that “hearing music is now an electronic experience. Almost all the music that surrounds us is amplified, electrified, processed and digitized. Most people’s perception of music is shaped by pop music and by recordings.” “The experience of hearing acoustic classical music is frequently disappointing, as the live sound cannot hope to match the clarity and balance we expect from CDs,” they observed. Lost Objects would respond to this concern with a refined sonic environment shared by acoustic and electric instruments and, in its early performances, a DJ. As the composers explained, In order to create now a live experience that can be recognized as a musical object, it is necessary to amplify all instruments and singers. Not only will this help to bring the concert experience up to date, but it will allow us to modify electronically the sound, through the use of live processing and distortion, and through the intervention of the djs with live remix capabilities.17 Lost Objects would feature Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, remixing tracks of the piece during three interludes. DJ Spooky performed in the world premiere at the Dresden Festival (with Concerto Köln and the RIASKammerchor) on May 23, 2001, and in the US premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of the Next Wave Festival, on November 30, December 2, 3, and 4, 2004. In their proposal, Lang, Gordon, and Wolfe also attended to the role of genre in Lost Objects: Behind all of our artistic decisions is the desire to have the baroque oratorio itself serve as subject matter for LOST OBJECTS, and to set up a direct

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  193 confrontation between old and new, the lost and the found. The format, the location, the shape of the evening, the relationships between voices and instruments are all comments on the traditions of baroque oratorio.18 While the composers do not state it overtly, perhaps what enables the confrontations within Lost Objects is the civic identity of the oratorio genre. For example, as Handel’s oratorios make clear, the form is home to a specific interweaving of religion and politics. His audiences in England would have found this combination natural. All members of those audiences may not have received the precise political meanings made by the libretto, but, as Ruth Smith explains, “these meanings were perceptible and available to them.”19 The interplay of religion and politics in Lost Objects is perhaps more delicate and dissonant than its eighteenth-century counterpart because of the vast historical divides the piece outlines—asking listeners to zigzag between centuries, nations, and technologies. Lang’s archival record also contains an email he sent to Torsten Mosgraber, then-director of the Dresden Festival, in response to what seem to have been questions Mosgraber raised about Lost Objects. Lang wrote that he (Lang) would “be responsible for all the ‘philosophical’ aspects,” apparently wanting to guide the collective understanding of the piece. While Lang noticed that Mosgraber’s questions were “about the hidden meaning of the work, or how our project creates some sort of narrative structure that leads the listener, step by step, to a polemical or philosophical conclusion,” the composer wanted to emphasize that he, Wolfe, and Gordon were making something that is not narrative. Lang also clarified the reasoning behind their invocation of the Talmud: It seems as if using the Talmud is a kind of confrontation with Germany but really we are accustomed to solving problems with the tools that are a part of ourselves. It is not supposed to be medicine for Germans! We are not interested in the Talmud because we think it is good for you, but because it is a natural part of us, of how our background has taught us to live in the world.20 Lang then shifted the emphasis away from a post-War cultural collision and onto the concept of the lost object. He wrote: What is a confrontation in this piece is our desire to make a text out of the ordinary, the common, the mundane. Baroque musical thinking is very lofty, very high-minded. It exists to uncover a certain exaltation of the spirit and the mind … Like you, I also believe that people may be healed through art; our piece may get to this place, but through the back door, by looking at how people relate to simple, everyday objects that fall into and then out of their lives.21 Here Lang suggests a difference in register between a Baroque intellectual outlook and the treatment of loss in Lost Objects. The question of scale, then—the clash of

194  Victoria Aschheim large and small—animates the piece. “Everyday objects,” and the music designed to honor them, assume a certain ethical charge—an aura of humility. The spirit of confrontation would also extend to the performance practice of Lost Objects. On March 12, 2003, Lang wrote a letter to the members of Concerto Köln. “Greetings from America!” it begins. He gives an overview of the project, first revisiting the conflict that the composers stage within the instrumentation: Everything surrounding the musical experience has been changed—everything old has been confronted with something new. Old instruments are amplified. The orchestra is magnified by ambient waves of live dj mixing. The old instrumentation of the baroque orchestra is augmented by the electric instruments of the Bang on a Can Lost Objects Ensemble. He then advises the musicians on technique and style: We determined that our music would not get its power from the baroque music that your orchestra already plays but from the raw physicality of the sounds of your instruments themselves … all of this music must be played in a 21st century way—forcefully, aggressively, and with great drama. It is important to remember that our music is not in any way baroque. It is not subtle. It is not made to breathe. It is not about a sophisticated interplay of affects. Your instrument may even have a different function in the orchestra than you are accustomed to. In fact, much of our piece is very brutal, or very restricted in technical and emotional range. To us, however, this is the power of the old within the new age: our music gets its nobility by confronting the brutality of the world with the only weapon we have—you, your instruments and your incredible musicianship.22 In his forthright instructions, Lang uses the metaphor of a weapon, a violent turn amid discussion of articulation and emotion. His words signal the composers’ fierce commitment to their musical language—their sound that is, by turns, vehement and patient, nimble and ponderous. The risk of obsolescence and the urge for freshness exert enormous psychic pressure. Lost Objects promises the chance to absorb this pressure efficiently and in community with others. Lost Objects in its final form consists of 11 movements. “I lost a sock” lists different lost things of different magnitudes. “Acoustic aphasia” captures the experience of losing one’s ability to comprehend speech. “Passenger pigeon” is about the homing bird and, by extension, other lost species and lost inventions that carried messages. Though not referenced in the text of the movement, Artman had in mind “Morse Code, balloons, the heliograph, smoke signals, cryptograms, boundary trees.”23 “When any man” is about a lost ancient Jewish ritual. “I found my enemy’s ox” cites the rule from Exodus 23:4 (in the Hebrew Bible) that discusses finding the beast of one’s enemy and the duty to return the lost animal to its owner. “Fw:Fw: Please look” expresses the terror of the disappearance of a child. The text recalls images of notices picturing the missing child, such as those once printed on

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  195 milk cartons. “Lost thing” and “Two are holding” deal with the Talmud’s instructions on people’s obligations when they find lost objects, including what should be done when two people find the same object at the same time. “Not our darkness (Loss of meaning)” is based on a statement by Nelson Mandela: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.” “We were enveloped” and “Amelia flying” concern the loss of the explorer George Mallory and the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, respectively. The DJ’s remixes happen after the third, seventh, and eleventh movements. The Juxtapositions of “I lost a sock” To magnify the idea of confrontation in Lost Objects, I look to the first movement, “I lost a sock,” which Lang composed.24 The movement is a list held together by rhythmic repetition. This format invites listeners to track productive tensions between old and new. The text of “I lost a sock” is an inventory of lost things. The items named range from the minute to the vast, and from workaday objects to human emotions. Though the mental image of an inventory might be one of verticality or hierarchy, the form also effects a kind of radical representation. There is an egalitarian feeling to the constant juxtapositions—a balance in the presence of difference. The text reads: I lost a sock. I lost an umbrella. I lost a sock. I lost a tooth. I lost my teeth. I lost a leg. I lost my dog. I lost an earring. I lost my father. I lost my voice. I lost my ticket. I lost the keys. I lost the map. I lost my wits. I lost my way. I lost my tongue. I lost my heart. I lost faith. I lost weight. I lost my hair. I lost my hand. I lost my eye. I lost my house.

196  Victoria Aschheim I lost my tongue. I lost my name. I lost my book. I lost my glasses. I lost my ring. I lost the store. I lost the farm. I lost a sock. I lost the eggs. I lost my cow. I lost my memory. I lost my teeth. I lost my color. I lost my hair. I lost my sight. I lost my way. I lost my balance. I lost my mother. I lost my shoe. I lost the business. I lost the carpet. I lost my language. I lost my god. I lost my pants. I lost my tan. I lost his number. I lost my desire. I lost weight. I lost my body. I lost water. I lost the water. I lost the tree. I lost the directions. I lost the car. I lost the combination. I lost the wood and the matches. I lost the candles. I lost my knife. I lost my gun. I lost my boots. I lost my daughter. I lost my nerve.

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  197 I lost my son. I lost my edge. I lost my wife. I lost my blanket. I lost my man. I lost my toy. I lost my anger. I lost my joy. I lost my cynicism. I lost my fear. I lost my land. I lost my resistance. Behind the apparent anonymity of the inventory that is “I lost a sock” lies a personal story of cultural memory connected to Lang’s Jewish identity. The role of Lost Objects as a vehicle for memory was especially meaningful, Lang said, because he comes from a family sensitive to the experiences of immigrants. The piece allowed him to think through his relationship to Germany. During his guest composition seminar on Lost Objects at the Yale School of Music on October 11, 2001, Lang explained: My mother was born in Germany … and my family had to come to this country because they were forced out when Hitler came to power … I had a lot of relatives who went through the concentration camps, and so Germany—I have the fortune that I have a lot of work in Germany right now, so I’m really happy about that. I have a lot of work, but on the other hand, I’m going to this place where I have, obviously, very problematic relations. I mean, I have a very strange relationship to working in Germany—I think as many Jewish people do, or many people from the West, you know, from our country too, also, not just Jews.25 It is especially poignant that Bang on a Can and Concerto Köln were brought together through the Dresden Festival, given the history of Dresden in World War II; the city was a cultural jewel bombed by Allied aircraft and reduced to rubble. Lang also shared that he wrote “I lost a sock” in response to images that depict the scale of life extinguished in the Holocaust. The idea behind the list of lost objects, he revealed, was that one of the things that was most powerful about the cleaning up of places like Auschwitz—I mean, it was sort of just the day-to-day accumulation of things that had been left over, and the giant pile that we’ve all seen—the giant pile of eyeglasses, and the giant pile of shoes, and the giant pile of rings, and the giant pile of watches. These things are just leftover everyday objects, but because people lost them, and especially because people lost them, under certain circumstances, they have a special kind of meaning.26

198  Victoria Aschheim Lang’s reference here brings into focus the ethical lives of these piles of objects, in all their irrepressible facticity. Circulating the images of these piles might destabilize the humanity of the people whom the objects represent metonymically. Yet the images hold evidential value as generations pass since the event of mass murder. For example, when he testified at the Adolf Eichmann trial, Adolf Berman, a former member of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, told how, after his liberation, he saw tens of thousands of shoes at Treblinka, many of which belonged to children. He took one tiny pair and carried it in his briefcase for years until he showed the shoes at the trial. As the law scholar Lawrence Douglas writes, “it was a stunning moment, in terms of the shoes’ power to conjure the single missing child and of the power of a single object to stand for the slaughter of the innocents.”27 Lost Objects, it turns out, is informed by the prospect that constellations of history and humanity can radiate behind one object. The text of “I lost a sock” is necessarily limited, but the items could stand in for many more things that humans share. Listeners, then, might identify with the “I” empathically, imagining themselves grappling with each loss that is named. The phrases are part observation, part confession. Taking inventory fulfills a documentary function. But the process morphs into a kind of apostrophe or address of the lost things, as if accounting for them might somehow rekindle a spark of the relationship between the narrator and the object or feeling named. Lang unifies the movement and amplifies the text’s indexical quality by assigning just one musical motif to each line of the inventory. His performance directions come in two phrases: “restrained and mysterious,” and “play simply, like a religious ritual.” “I lost a sock” explores a G Aeolian modality; within the movement, three musical ideas repeat at different intervals with only slight variation. The movement begins with a solo soprano alternating between D and C, marking out minor sevenths in triplets to declaim the text. Each line of text begins and ends with a rest, with the voice entering on the third triplet of a given beat. Each syllable is set to one triplet eighth note, and the length of the melodic fragment matches the number of syllables in a line of text. “I lost a” always falls on D-C-D, and the name of the object on C. Most of the remaining ensemble soon enters (at bar 11; see Example 12.1), adding depth to the soprano line. As the rest of the sopranos and altos join the soloist, the right hand of the electric keyboard matches their pitches in unison. The tenors and basses, along with the keyboard and timpani, add a G in rhythmic unison with the sopranos and altos whenever they name an object. This pattern holds for the entire movement. The second musical character enters at bar 11, in the flutes, electric bass, and first violin. They play descending arpeggiated whole notes over six bars. The first violin has all six pitches, while the flute and electric bass drop out after the fourth pitch of each sequence. The primary harmony outlined throughout the movement is a G minor triad. To develop the pattern here, Lang uses a process of rotation: one pitch of the six moves down by a step, and the others remain the same. Pitches change in order: the first pitch changes in the second statement of the segment, the second one changes in the third statement, etc. After a pitch descends, it returns to the original pitch (for example, after the first G from bar 11 becomes F in bar

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  199

Example 12.1  David Lang, “I lost a sock,” bars 10–16. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing.

200  Victoria Aschheim

Example 12.1  Contd.

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  201

Example 12.1  Contd.

202  Victoria Aschheim 17, it returns to G in bar 23). Six of these six-bar statements comprise an entire cycle, where each permutation of the descending pitches is heard. The movement contains 18 statements of this pattern. The pattern undergoes some modifications, including reversing the order of pitch changes. The descending whole-note character varies across the movement. The first change occurs when the oboes and second violin take up a G. These parts echo the original pattern that began in bar 11. Then in bar 23, the violas, cellos, bassoon, and harpsichord play a similar echoing figure that resembles the original statement in bar 11, but in this variation, pitches change on the second half-note triplet of each bar. The third variation subtly reinforces the viola, cello, bassoon, and harpsichord: beginning in bar 28, these instruments add octave support to the low G that concludes their statement. The third distinct character of the movement appears in the electric guitar, which plays quarter notes, changing pitch every five bars. The guitar cycles through a six-pitch stepwise pattern that repeats through the rest of the movement. Twenty-two pitch changes occur—just under four cycles of the six-pitch pattern. The natural minor mode and the weighty sense of ticking time implied by the tempo marking of quarter note = 60 lend the movement a grounded calm. By contrast, the crystalline ring of the voices, free of vibrato, and the glow of the instruments’ long tones are otherworldly. The wide interval to which the text is set, and the registral expanse covered by the instruments, gradually open up what would seem to be tight, controlled syntax. The confrontation of old and new takes the form of a blended timbre: taut, gleaming threads of acoustic and electric sound wind through the movement alongside the voices. The triplet subdivisions smooth the edges of the bare rhythmic template. What is the significance of rotation and cyclical patterns to the inventory, itself a product of counting? It is worth considering the perceptual effects of rotation in music that combines the precision of a tally with the vulnerability of personal disclosure. Lang’s musical design encourages listeners to circle around the central theme of loss, to recognize loss as its terms shift with the changing text. In the context of a composition that was inspired, in large part, by the impulse toward Talmudic problem-solving, I would extend the concept of rotation to a metaphorical register. Here, I suggest, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s description of the intellectual spirit behind pilpul, the East European method of studying and interpreting Talmudic texts, offers a vivid point of comparison. In this practice, he says, Ideas were like precious stones. The thought that animated them reflected a wealth of nuances and distinctions, as the ray of light passing through a prism produces the colors of the rainbow. Upon rotation, many-faceted ideas shed a glittering brilliance that varied in accordance with the direction in which they were placed against the light of reason. Heschel noticed how in the context of such rotation, “concepts acquired a dynamic quality, a color and meaning that, at first thought, seemed to have no connection with one another.”28 Similarly, in “I lost a sock,” the passage of the text through the

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  203 instruments’ cycles of descending pitches illuminates each word and moment with slightly different shading. Listeners continually recalibrate after each item in the inventory is named. Through the music, the idea of loss itself acquires many gradations. The Old and New Catharsis of “When any man” “I lost a sock” finds a foil in the text of the fourth movement of Lost Objects, “When any man,” another movement written by Lang. It is a combination of selections from Leviticus (in the Hebrew Bible), 1:2–9, 4:13–20, and 6:5–6, beginning with the words, “When any man of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of cattle from the herd or from the flock.” While the text recounts an ancient ritual of sacrifice, now a lost object, the devotional action is made new each time Jewish people draw near to God. According to Jewish ethics, the sins committed by an individual can harm society even in the case where the act was done inadvertently. Reparation for the act sparked the development of a system of repentance on the great Day of Purgation. The energies behind the purgation rite of the ancient Temple (itself also a lost object) now motivate the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. To paraphrase the biblical scholar Jacob Milgrom, the purgation rite from ancient times was transformed into the purgation of “the human heart.”29 “When any man,” then, contains this line of continuity between old and new. The catalog of the rites of animal sacrifice in the sanctuary of the ancient Temple is an example of regulations in which “the people’s relationship with God would be enacted regularly, repeatedly, through ritual, and a body of general law,” as the translator Robert Alter puts it.30 The rigor of the vocal and instrumental parts in “When any man” matches the exacting might of the text’s prescriptions. The thunderous rhythmic drive and resonant warmth of the instruments also channel (in a figurative sense) what I perceive as the social cohesion and artistic devotion of both ensembles. Likewise, when Wolfe remarked on the ideological affinity between the ensembles, she mentioned sound in the same breath: They [Concerto Köln] are obsessed with their old instruments, and made the decision not to go into the mainstream, just as we have carved out this odd niche in the music world. So there was a great deal of sympathy between us. Also, they are incredibly fiery. The sound is very earthy, very alive.31 “When any man” is propelled by the collective power of the chorus, which is active for the entire movement. Like “I lost a sock,” “When any man” lies within a single modality (D Aeolian), and its shape emerges from its unflinching linear pull. Each instrument contributes to one of three musical characters. The first consists of quarter-note triplets moving stepwise or remaining static in the flutes, oboes, trumpets, electric guitar, electric bass, timpani, and all four vocal parts. The second involves mostly angular, arpeggiated motion and sixteenth notes in the drums, harpsichord, violins, and viola. The third character, occupying the lowest register, is sustained pedal tones in the bassoon, horn, sampler, cello, and bass (Example 12.2).32

204  Victoria Aschheim

Example 12.2  David Lang, “When any man,” bars 1–4. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing.

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  205 The first group moves in rhythmic unison, with the sopranos and altos on G and F and the tenors and basses on D and C. Each voice part either shifts back and forth between its two pitches or remains on one of them. The four vocal parts echo one another from top to bottom: a pitch change in the sopranos is echoed one quarter-note triplet later in the altos, which is followed one quarternote triplet later in the tenors, and then again in the basses. The instruments in this group reinforce each vocal part in either pure unison or octave unison. The sopranos are joined by flute 1, oboe 1, and electric guitar (top part); the altos by flute 2, oboe 2, and electric guitar (bottom part); the tenors by trumpet 1 and electric bass (top part); and basses by trumpet 2, electric bass (bottom part), and timpani. The second group provides the rhythmic core. The drums and harpsichord play nearly constant sixteenth notes, with just sporadic rests. The first and second violin produce composite sixteenths, while the viola has eighths. This group has the widest span of pitches: it uses all pitches of the mode. The harpsichord establishes the primary sequence in the group, generally descending two or three pitches at a time by intervals of a third, fourth, or fifth. The violins’ sixteenths are in unison with the harpsichord. A few pitches emerge from the texture—the highest ones played in any given duration. These pitches also appear in the bass (third) group. All instruments except the sampler are instructed to breathe or change bow as necessary, and no more than two instruments rest at a given time. The instruments in “When any man” build a solid architecture out of stratified sections that each integrate the old (Baroque orchestra) and new (Bang on a Can ensemble) sounds. The voices’ oscillation between pitches one step apart outlines only the sparest of melodic shapes. This bold profile gives the movement its intense declamatory force. “When any man” brings both historical families of instruments together through clear articulation and percussive strength. The Relationality of Loss The heartbeat of Lost Objects is its relational action. Confrontations of old and new happen across the parameters of the piece, from its creative process to its instrumentation, syntax, and the physical vigor of its performance. The conditions of hybridity and in-betweenness that arise from the piece’s confrontations are also relevant to the concepts of loss and lostness. These concepts are chronological and ontological, and they are dynamic, open to the contingencies of care, identity, and belonging. In Lost Objects, lostness becomes a dimension, I would argue—a particular measure of musical and historical time. Into the philosophical frame of Lost Objects, where religious and social thought intersect, I would bring Martin Buber’s view of relationality. He writes that the individual is a fact of existence in so far as he steps into a living relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence in so far as it is built up of living units of relation.

206  Victoria Aschheim This relation, Buber believes, “is rooted in one being turning to another as another, as this particular other being, in order to communicate with it in a sphere which is common to them but which reaches out beyond the special sphere of each.” He calls this “the sphere of ‘between’… the real place and bearer of what happens between men.”33 The dimensional quality of confrontation in Lost Objects is like such a “between.” And this “between” that the composers and performers create is an alternative to the spatiality implied by the word “oratorio” (a spatiality that Artman maintains when she describes Lost Objects as “a prayer hall”34). The persistent, pulse-driven repetition in Lost Objects—which takes on different contours in each sharply drawn movement—heightens the impression of the sound as an intersubjective “between.” This sound balances cool, observational distance with the acute rush of time and the charged hope of remembrance. The collaborative social practice of Lost Objects happens in this “between,” too: it is dialogical, culturally reparative work oriented by the turning points of World War II and the year 2000. Lost Objects convenes two ensembles both searching, in synchronicity, for objects, for relationships, for sounds at their moment of invention, of arrival—early and new. Notes 1 Michael Gordon, “Finding ‘Lost Objects’ in Germany,” New York Times Opinionator, March 22, 2007, http://opinionator​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/03​/22​/finding​-lost​-objects​ -in​-germany/?​_r=0 (accessed June 21, 2016). 2 In using the term “new music,” I am simpatico with Nadia Sirota’s view that “new music is just music that is written by people who are alive at this time.” Greta Johnsen and Tricia Bobeda, “The Viola and the Octopus: Nadia Sirota’s Two Loves,” WBEZ Chicago, September 15, 2017, https://www​.wbez​.org​/stories​/the​-viola​-and​-the​-octopus​ -nadia​-sirotas​-two​-loves​/630c6b3e​-509c​-4051​-ba28​-6bc6ba2a89cd (accessed Sep­ tember 24, 2021). Perhaps this definition could be taken to telescope—or, to the contrary, efface—what Seth Brodsky calls the “material conditions and the behaviors they afford and produce,” to which new music “testifies.” These conditions, he writes, lead “to a series of specialized communities and a specialized form of ‘composerly’ labor.” Brodsky, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (Oakland, University of California Press, 2017), 108. 3 “David Lang: Lost Objects,” National Theatre Opera of Prague, November 11, 2015, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=zB​_RraVinm0 (accessed June 21, 2016). 4 Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Lost Objects (New York: Red Poppy Music, 2000). A recording of Lost Objects with Concerto Köln, RIAS-Kammerchor, the Bang on a Can Lost Objects ensemble, and DJ Spooky was released on Teldec on May 15, 2001. Lost Objects was also performed at Northwestern University on May 1, 2015, and at the Orchestra of the National Theatre Opera of Prague from December 15, 2015, to January 24, 2016. 5 Deborah Artman, Program note to Lost Objects, BAMbill, Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, November 2004. 6 Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition (New York: Random House, 1989), vol I. Tractate Bava Metzia, part I, 1–2, 7; The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, vol II. Tractate Bava Metzia, part II, 1–2; Reference Guide. The Talmud is an archive of the memory and law of the Jewish people. The Talmud has two main components: the Mishnah, a book of halakhah (law) written in Hebrew (the first written summary of

The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects  207 the Oral Law), and the Gemarah (also called Talmud in the more restricted sense of the term), a commentary on the Mishnah. 7 David Lang, “concerto Köln conductor letter,” March 12, 2003. Lang wrote to Olaf Lischke, then-director of Concerto Köln, “Here is the letter – I hope it will explain some of the philosophy of the piece for your players.” Also, Lang, “Dresden proposal.3,” July 9, 1999. 8 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft,” November 30, 1999. 9 Lang saved earlier versions of the proposal: “Dresden proposal,” June 30, 1999; “Dresden proposal.1,” July 1, 1999; “Dresden proposal.2,” July 6, 1999; “Dresden proposal.3,” July 9, 1999; “Dresden proposal.4,” November 15, 1999. 10 “David Lang: Lost Objects,” https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=zB​_RraVinm0 (accessed June 21, 2016). In this vein, Artman writes in her program note: “In the world we live in now, faster is better, newer is better, better is better. Our culture invents and discards at an escalating and alarming rate. There’s hardly a minute to acknowledge the value of an object before it is replaced.” Something of the bittersweetness and even the shock of this realization about progress and loss is captured in Brodsky’s remark: “Modernity as pharmakon, poison and cure at once, the utopia of instrumental rationality and its dystopian consequences. I think here of Marshall Berman[’s] … classic formulation that ‘to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’” Brodsky, From 1989, 121. 11 With the growth of the internet has come the ascendancy of the digital archive (in its many forms—institutional, personal, social media) and its promise of infinitude. Things may be forgotten—lost—but they are instantly retrievable. 12 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft,” November 30, 1999. 13 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft.” 14 Laura Hoptman, email to David Lang, “Dresden Baroque,” November 16, 1999. 15 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft.” 16 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft.” 17 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft.” 18 Lang, “Dresden proposal—draft.” 19 Ruth Smith, Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11. 20 Lang, “Dresden proposal.3,” July 9, 1999. 21 Lang, “Dresden proposal.3.” 22 Lang, “concerto Köln conductor letter,” March 12, 2003. 23 Artman, Program note. 24 Each composer wrote a set of movements. 25 David Lang, Yale School of Music composition seminar, Yale University Oral History of American Music, CD OHV 185n, October 11, 2001. 26 Lang, composition seminar. 27 Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 162. 28 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1995), 54. 29 Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics. A Continental Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 16. The Hebrew word for sacrifice derives from the verb meaning “to bring near”; this is a metaphor (and a method) for the Israelites reaching out to God. Milgrom, Leviticus, 17. The ritual sacrifice involving blood on the altar is described by the word kippur, “purge,” as in Yom Kippur. Milgrom, Leviticus, 31.

208  Victoria Aschheim 30 Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation and Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), xiv. 31 Stuart Isacoff, “Finding Beauty in Loss,” New York Sun, November 30, 2004. 32 Here “sampler” denotes the keyboard (as distinct from the harpsichord). 33 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Mansfield, CT: Martino Publishing, 2014), 203. 34 Artman, Program note. “Oratorio” comes from the Latin oratorium (oratory or prayer hall).

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures; page numbers in bold refer to musical examples.   Beasley, Marco 181 Abbey Singers 56 Beatles, covers by Cathy Berberian 171–4 Academy of Ancient Music 95 Beauchamp, Cameron 152, 155–6, 161–2 Affektenlehre 100 Beecher, Lembit, The Conference of the agency, performers’ 66 Birds 158 Aho, Kalevi 99 Beerbohm, Max, drawing of Lord Berners Alarm 152 108, 109 Alash Ensemble 153 Beethoven, Ludwig van, Horn Sonata 121; Alden, Jane 65 Symphony No. 9 120 Alter, Robert 203 Beghin, Tom 138 Anderson, Laurie 48 Bensman, Cheryl 51 Andriessen, Hendrik 110 Benson, Joan 107–8 Andriessen, Louis 51, 110, 166, 173–5, Berberian, Cathy 61, 73, 89; acting 180; “Ticket to Ride” 173; “You’ve Got 176–7; early music vocality of 166–88; to Hide Your Love Away” 173 Morsicat(h)y 171; Stripsody 166, 179 anti-canonism 85–6 Berio, Luciano 166–9, 170, 173–6, 180; Applebaum, Mark 61, 74; Control C’è la musica e musica 174; Epifanie Freak 71–2, 72; The Metaphysics of 171; Epiphanies 172; Gesti 175; Notation 71 “Michelle” 173–4; Recital I (for Cathy) Artman, Deborah 189, 194 178; Rounds with Voice 171; Sequenza audio plug-ins (API) 31 III 171, 175; Sinfonia 153, 156; “Ticket augmentation 71 to Ride” 173–4; “Yesterday” 173–4 authenticity, personal 23 Berkeley, Lennox, Prelude and Fugue 110   Berners, Lord (Gerald Tyrwhitt), and the B’Rock Orchestra 95 clavichord 108 Babbitt, Milton 89; Philomel 87, 89–90, 88 Birnbaum, Abraham 66, 74 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 68–9 Blachly, Alexander 54–7 Bach, Johann Sebastian 53, 66, 180; First Black MIDI 27 Brandenburg Concerto, revival “Casals” Blitz, Daniel 110 style 157; quotations from 95–6, 100 Boccherini, Luigi, notation of portato 69 Banchieri, Adriano 67 Bohn, David 108; “Daniel Blitz Clavichord Bang on a Can 48, 152, 189–90, 194, 197 Project” 110 Bartók, Béla, Viola Concerto 153 Bonnard, Pierre 99 basso continuo figures 67–8 Borges, Jorge Luis 22 Bauman, Zygmunt 43 Boston Camerata 51 Baumann, Hella 123 Boulez, Pierre 56, 89, 169 Baumann, Hermann 123; Elegia für Boyer, Guy 171, 173 Naturhorn 123–4, 124 Brain, Denis 121–2 Beardslee, Bethany 87, 89 Brittelle, William, Psychedelics 156 

Index  229 Britten, Benjamin, Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings 121–2, 122; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge 157 Brown, Earle 63–5, 74; December 1952 64 Brownlee, Bill 136, 144 Bruckner, Anton 106 Brüggen, Frans 174–5, 179–80 Buber, Martin 205–6 Bujanowski, Vitali 123 Bullard, Alan 108; Air and Gigue 108; Six Miniatures 108 Burwell, Carter 163 Bussotti, Sylvano 166 Butt, John 91, 103 Byrne, Liam 22   Caccini, Giulio 67–8, 178–9 Cage, John 43, 51–2, 62–4, 74, 166, 169; Music of Changes 63 Cahn-Lipman, Kivie 135 Calabris, Michael, Love, Deception, Delusion, & Counterpoint 114 Calliope 48, 51 Campiello Band 48, 51 canon as a minimalist technique 47 canonism 84 cantus firmus and minimalism 46–7 Carlos, Wendy 52 Carpenter, Gary 111 Carter, Elliott 54 Cavatorta, Andy 139 Cawkwell, Yumi Hara 114 Chadabe, Joel 29 Chopin, E♭ Nocturne 73–4 Christensen, Kerry 153 Clarke, Haward 110 clavichord: electric 107; ensemble music for 114; microtonal 107 clavichord music, modern 106–17 clavinet 114; Hohner 107 Collins, Judy 55 community and compositional style 140–4 competitions for clavichord compositions 111 composition, algorithmic 64; collaborative 155 Concentus Musicus Wien 50, 168, 175 Concerto Köln 189, 192, 194, 197, 203 confrontation of old and new 189–208 consort principle 49 Contemporary Chamber Ensemble 54 Cordier, Baude 65 Cortot, Alfred 74 Couperin, François 72, 99; ornament table 66–8

Cranmer, John 111 Crees, Kathleen 108 Crumb, George 54, 56 Cunningham, Sarah 135, 141 Cypess, Rebecca 90 Cyr, Sunny 162   Danks, Mark 34 Darbellay, Jean-Luc 123 Dart, Thurston 108, 111 Dauprat, Louis-François 119 Davidoff, Judith 51 Davis, Paul 38 Dawson, Eleanor 21 de Leeuw, Ton 110 de Man, Roderik 110 DeBlasio, Chris 110 decision making, musical 27–8 DeGaetani, Jan 54–7 Del Tredici, David 43 democracy in music 27–47 Deroubaix, Jeanne 175 Dervishes 139 Dessner, Bryce 163 diachronic community” and music 142 Dickinson, Peter: Five Diversions 110–11; Suite for the Centenary of Lord Berners for Clavichord 108 Dijk, Jan van, 110 dissonance treatment and vibrato 86 Dodgson, Stephen 110 Dolan, Emily I. 137 Dolmetsch, Arnold 106; historic copies of clavichords 106–7 Doty, Liesl 157 Douglas, Lawrence 198 Dove, Jonathan, Figures in the Garden 124–5 Dresden Festival 189, 192–3, 197 Dromey, Christopher 80 Druckman, Jacob 56 Dudley, Eric 153 Dukas, Paul, Villanelle 128 Dunedin Consort 95 Duryee, Alissa 111; Forager’s Journal 111 Dünki, Jean-Jacques 108 Dylan, Bob 173 Dyson, Peter, Adrian’s Booke 108 Dyson, Ruth 108   Earhart, Amelia 195 Earle, Kinlock 157 early music and minimalism 42–60 Eastop, Pip, Set the Wild Echoes Flying 123 Eckert, Rinde 153

230 Index Eco, Umberto 96–7, 169, 175, 180 Edition for Contemporary Music (ECM) 55 Eidsheim, Nina Sun 91–2 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 30, 32 Elektra 51–3 Emmerson, Simon: Points of Departure 20, 23; Time-Space 21 Ensemble for Early Music 51 Esfahani, Mahan 95, 151–2 eye music 65   Falla, Manuel de, works for clavichord 107 A Far Cry 149–52, 156–61, 163–4 Feldman, Morton 63, 75n.6 Fick, Kimary, and Jason Fick, Silhouettes 22–3 Fink, Robert 46 Finnish Baroque Orchestra 95 Fogel, Karl 37–8 Fontyn, Jacqueline 99–100; Es ist ein Ozean 100; La fenêtre ouverte 99–100; Shadows 100 Forget, Philippe 111 Francis, Alun 123 Freiburger Barockorchester 95 Frescobaldi, Girolamo 138 Fretwork 51 Freund, Marya 168 Frey, Elinor 95 “fringe artifacts” 137, 142–3 Furse, Richard 31–2   Garbarek, Jan 55 GEM 34 Geminiani, Francesco, Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick 68 Geoffrion, Renée 107 Gesualdo, Carlo 179 Ghedini, Giorgio 170 Glass, Philip 43, 55, 152 Gleich, Ferdinand 120–1 Goble & Sons clavichords 107 Goehr, Lydia 30 Goeyvaerts, Karel 43, 110 Goff, Thomas, clavichords 107 Goodwin, Paul 95 Goossens, Eugene 110 Gordon, Michael 189–208 Gordon, Michael, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, Lost Objects 189–208 Górecki, Henryk 57 graphic notation 61, 65, 110; in 17th–18thcentury music 65–9; 19th-century 69–74; in 20th-century avant garde 62–5 Greenberg, Noah 53; Pro Musica Antiqua 48

Greenstein, Judd 153 Greer, Lowell 123 Griffin, Avery 153 Grimes, Rachel 158 Guy, Barry, Only Today 111   Haacke, Walter 110; Ausgefallene Einfälle 111 hairpin notation 70–1 Hammer, Victor 107 harmonies, “dirty” 126–7 Harms, Ben 51 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus 50, 101, 166, 168, 175, 177–80 Hartzell, Eugene, Monologue 10 122 Harvey, William S. 54 Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman, Chordophonie 2, mobile für Clavichord 110–11 Haynes, Bruce 84 Heininen, Paavo, Musica ambigua 97–9 Herron, Molly: Stellar Atmospheres 139; Three Sarabandes 141; Through Lines 135–45 Heschel, R. Abraham Joshua 202 Hessenburg, Kurt 110 Hilliard Ensemble 51, 55 Hillier, Paul 47, 50–1, 55 HIP: interactive computer music 13–24; and new music 1–5, 87–91; norms in contemporary music 103–4; and vibrato 84–7 hocket 51 Hoddinott, Alun, Sonatina 110 Hogwood, Christopher 95 Hoketus 51 Hold, Trevor, The Wadenhoe Clavichord Book 108 Holland Festival 179 Holocaust and loss 197–8 Holzman, Jac 52–4 Hoptman, Laura 191 horns, hunting 119 horns, natural, in new music 118–34; modern works for 129–30; pitches 119– 20; stopped notes 119–20; tuning 131 horns, valve 118, 120–1; with natural horn tunings 132 Hovhaness, Alan 110 Howells, Herbert 108; Lambert’s Clavichord 108   improvisation 155; in new music 90–1; recorded 139 interactive performing environments as spaces 23

Index  231 IRCAM 33–4 Irons, Jesse 150–1, 156–61   Jaffee, Michael and Kay 51 Jarrett, Keith, Köln Concert 138–9 Jeans, Susi 108, 111   Kalish, Gilbert 54 Karijord, Rebecca 163 Kelly, Thomas Forest 84–5 Kemper, Steven 90 Kennerly, Grace 160–1 Kim, David Hyun-su Kim 70 Kim, Sunsu 155 Kirkpatrick, Ralph 108 Kivy, Peter 23 Knights, Francis 108 Knowles, Alison 63 Koczalski, Raoul 73–4 Korhonen, Kimmo 97 Kramer, Richard 13–19 Krol, Bernhard 123 Kronos Quartet 57 Kuijken, Barthold 66 Kutter, Markus 171   Lachert, Piotr 110; Concerto africain 110 Lacour, Marcelle de 107 LADSPA 31–2; 36–8 Lambert, Herbert 108 Landowska, Wanda 107–8 Lang, David 48, 142, 189–208; “I lost a sock” 199–201; “When any man” 204 LaPine, Peter R. 80 laptop musicians 27–47 Laurin, Dan 95 leadership, collective 150–2 Leenhouts, Paul 20 Lenz, Alev 163 Lenz, Wilhelm von 73 Leppard, Raymond 176 Les Coucous Bénévoles 101 Lewis, Megumi 151, 158, 163 Ligeti, György 56; Hamburg Concerto 125–8, 126–7; Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano 122, 126 Linde, Hans-Martin 95; Anspielungen 95–6, 96 Linux list 30–3, 37 Lionheart 51 Liszt, Franz, “Au bord d’une source,” notation 73 Lockwood, Gayle 153 Loeb, David 114; Fleetings 107; Wanderings 110

Ludwig, Loren 135 Luesser, Joseph 107 Luolajan-Mikkola, Markku 95 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, Madrigali per cantare e sonare 67 Lynch, Graham 111; Petenera 114   Mace, Thomas 49 McNutt, Elizabeth 23–43 McPherson, Andrew 138 Maderna, Bruno 166, 169–70, 180 Magnetic Resonator Piano 138 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 170 Mallory, George 195 Man, Roderik de, Elongated Fingers 107 Mandela, Nelson 195 Marais, Marin 136, 143 Marini, Biagio 138 Martinů, Bohuslav 107 Mattheson, Johann 83 Maxwell Davies, Peter 55–6, 89, 114; Four Lessons for Two Keyboards 111 Messiaen, Olivier 100, Des canyons aux étoiles 122 Michael Nyman Band 48 MIDI 27, 37 Milgrom, Jacob 203 Miller, Paul D. (DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) 192 minimalism and the early music revival 42–60 Moens-Haenen, Greta 81 Monk, Meredith 48, 55, 152 Monteverdi, Claudio 170–1, 175–6, 180; Ballo delle ingrate 176–7; Berberian’s interpretations of 179–80; Combattimento 171, 176–8; L’incoronazione di Poppea 175; Lamento della ninfa 178; Lettera amorosa 178; Orfeo 166, 175; recordings by Berberian 181 Moody, Ivan, Passacaglia 114 Moog, Robert 29 Moran, Robert, Basha 111 Morely-Pegge, Reginald 121 Morton, Lawrence 170 Mosgraber, Torsten 193 Mozart, Leopold 69 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 83; The Marriage of Figaro 125 musical instruments as technologies 136–44 Mussolini, Benito 169 Müller, Stefan 107

232 Index Negrón, Angelica, et al., The Blue Hour 158 Neumann, Frederick 81–3 Neumeyer, Fritz 108 New York Pro Musica Antiqua 53, 56 New York Renaissance Band 51 Nielsen, Carl 106 Nonesuch 53–7 Nono, Luigi 169 Norman, Andrew, Companion Guide to Rome 157 nota battuta 171, 175 Nova, Shara 158 Nyman, Michael 43, 48   Oates, Janet, Humming Suite 111 Oliveros, Pauline 48, 65; Anthology of Text Scores 64 omnivore, musical 149–65 open-source software 33–5 oratorios 192–3, 205 Orden, Kate van, 32, 35 Orientalism, “decorative” 102 ornaments 66–7 Ortiz, Diego, Trattado de glosas 45 ownership of performance 142   Paribeni, Giulio Cesare 170 Pass, Joe 114 Paull, Jennifer 181 Pärt, Arvo 46, 50–1, 55, 57 Peck, Justin 163 Pepping, Ernst, Sonate 1 110 Pereksta, Linda H. 100 performance practice, open-source 27–47 Perkins, Julian 108 Peterson, Oscar 114 Pérotin, Viderunt omnes 46 Pflüger, Hans 123 Philip Glass Ensemble 48 Picforth 136, 143 pilpul, intellectual spirit behind 202 Pinkham, Daniel 110 Plantamura, Carol 181 Pleasants, Virginia 108, 111 Pomerium 48, 54–5 Pompili, Claudio: La specchio del fiore 102; Lo spazio stellato si riflette in suoni 102 Poole, Elissa 100–2 postmodernism, 96–7; as “doublecoding” 5 Potter, John 81

Potter, Keith 43 Poulenc, Francis, works for clavichord 107 Pousseur, Henri 166, 169; Naturel 122 preludes, unmeasured 68 Preston, Stephen 95 print culture and notation 29–30 Puckette, Miller 33–4, 37   Quantz, Johann Joachim 21, 155 Quintschreiber, Georg 83 Quirk, Sean 153 Rachmaninoff, Sergei: Etude Tableau 70–1; use of hairpins 70–1 Rankine, Claudia 90 Raselli, Francesco 124 Ravel, Maurice, Pavane pour une infante défunte 128 Raymond, Eric S. 32–3 record labels 51–4 Rehding, Alexander 137 Reich, Steve 43, 46–7, 49–50, 55, 152; Come Out 56; It’s Gonna Rain 47 RIAS-Kammerchor 192 Ridout, Alan, Suite for Clavichord 110 Rifkin, Joshua 43, 51–7 Riley, Terry, In C 43, 44, 46, 48, 51, 56 Rivet, Louis-Philippe, Nomoi of the Great Olympian Divinities 107 Robinson, Ben Luca, Artemisia 23 Roomful of Teeth 91, 149–50, 152– 6, 161–4 Ruland, Heiner 107 Rust, Friedrich Wilhelm, Sonata in G 111   Sachs, Annette 108, 110 Said, Edward 102 Sam, Ayan-ool 153 Sarasate, Pablo de, Zigeunerweise 69–70, 70 Satie, Eric, Vexations 43 Sauer, Theresa 63–4 Schaefer, John 136 Scheibe, Johann Adolph 66 Scherchen, Hermann 169 Schoenberg, Arnold, models 98–9 Schrey, Cleek 137 Science Ficta 22, 135, 141–2, 144 Scott, Anthony 110 “scurry” 143 Seiber, Matyas, Pezzo per il clavicordo 111, 112 Senleches, Jaquemin de 65

Index  233 Sharman, Rodney 101; After Truth 101–2; Snared Harmonies 101–2 Shaw, Caroline 90–1; 153–6, 158, 161; Music in Common Time 157; This Might Also Be a Form of Dreaming 90–1 Sigurðsson, Valgeir, Dissonance 22 Small, Christopher 64 Smith, Candace 181 Smith, Linda Catlin 100–1; Gray Broken 101; La Céline 101 Smith, Rush 193 Snead, Jonathan 20–1 Snider, Sarah Kirkland 158 So Percussion 152 Solomon, Maynard 53–4 Solomon, Seymour 52–3 Sonnleitner, Johann 107 Stein, Leonard 170 Sterne, Theresa 54–5, 56–7 Steve Reich and Musicians 48, 50–1 Stevens, Denis, Accademia Monteverdiana 48 Still, Robert 110 Stirling, Jane 73 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 169 Studio di Fonologia Musicale 169 Subotnik, Morton 52 Sylvan, Sanford 155 synthesizers 27, 29   Talmud, source of libretto of Lost Objects 189, 191, 193, 195 Taraf de Haidouks 156 Taruskin, Richard 48–9, 55 Taylor, Geoffrey Alan 111 technology and/as community 135–45 Telemann, Georg Philipp: Gulliver’s Travels Suite 68; Nouveaux quatuors en six suites 98 Tenney, James 43 Théberge, Paul 29, 33, 37 Thomas, Michael 108, 110 Thomé, Francis, Rigodon 107 Thompson, Eric 121–2 Thow, John, To Invoke the Clouds 102 Tienssu, Jukka 96–9; Tiet/Lots 98–9 timbral qualities of historical instruments 20–1 timbre 136–7, 143–4, 190, 202 Toia, Gabriele 111 traverso (one-keyed flute), new music for 95–105 tremolo 81, 83 trill notation 71–3

trilletto 83 trillo 83 Tudor, David 43 tuning systems compared 131 Turceasca 156 Turnabout 54 Tye, Christopher, In Nomine “Crye” 143   Universal Synthesizer Interface 27 Upshaw, Dawn 57 Usher, Julia 111; Clavicle 111, 113 Usui, Shiori, In Digestion 158   Vanguard 52–3 Vasquez, Juan Carlos: The Mirrors of Uqbar 22–3 Vaughan, Mike 20 Velez, Glen 51 Verhaar, Ary 110 vibrato 68–79; definition of, 80–2; and HIP 79–94; instrumental 96; and new music 89–90; primary sources on 82–4; and recordings 89 Vigo, Giorgina del 168 viola da gamba consorts, new music for 135–45 Vischer, Antoinette 171 Vivaldi, Antonio 53 voce bianca 181 Vox 52   Waldhorn 120–1 Waverly Consort 48, 51, 56 Weisberg, Arthur 54 Weiss, Zoe 135 Wells, Brad 152, 161 West, Kanye 163 Western Wind 48, 51 Wilson, Nick 43 Winter Consort 49 Wolfe, Julia 48–50; 189–208 Wolff, Christian 43 Wood, Ethan, “Ah! vous dirai-je Maman: A Folk Tale” 158 Woodhouse, Violet Gordon 106 work-concept 30 Wuorinen, Charles 54   Young, La Monte 43, 46, 48   Z, Pamela 89–90; Badagada 89–90 Zacconi, Lodovico 82 Zimmermann, Walter 48