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2010 14: 3Musicae ScientiaeNicholas Cook

The Ghost in the Machine: Towards a Musicology of Recordings

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Musicat Scientia Fall 2010. Vol XlV, no 2. 3-21

0 2010 by ESCOM European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music

The ghost in the machine: towards a musicology of recordings

NICHOLAS COOK Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

ABSTRACT This article introduces the other contributions to this second issue of Musicae Scientiae devoted to the work of the AHRC Research Centre for the Hlstory and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and sets them into the larger context of musicological research into recorded musical Performance. There is consideration of musicology's historically odd relationship to performance, including the historically informed performance movement and what is referred to as the 'page-to-stage' approach of recent music theory: CHARM's analytical projects focussed on aspects overlooked by the score-based approach, on the potential for bottom-up methods, and on the nature of performance style and the extent to which it can be meaningfully analysed by empirical methods. Another strand of CHARM's research investigated the extent to which the commercial practices of the record industry have helped to shape twentieth-century performance. The author includes brief accounts of his own projects with CHARM so as to provide an overview of the Centre's work as a whole.

This is the second of two issues of Musicae Scientiae presenting work by researchers at CHARM, the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music based at Royal Holloway, University of London. CHARM was set up in 2004 on the basis of a five-year grant from the AHRC, and received a further five years of funding from 2009, but at that point changed its name in order to signal a development of its research focus: it is now the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP, based at the University of Cambridge). The articles published in this volume are equally relevant to both centres, being contributions to the developing musicology of performance, with the term 'musicology' being understood in its broadest sense as ranging from empirical and computational work at one extreme to cultural approaches on the other. My purpose in this introductory article is twofold: on the one hand to set the featured articles into the context of other research undertaken at CHARM, and on the other to consider how CHARM'S now completed research

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agenda relates to other approaches found within the broader field of musical performance studies.

CHARM’S work involved the analysis of recordings both as a means of studying the performance events of which they are (to a greater or lesser degree) a trace, and as an object of study in their own right. The latter brought within CHARM’S purview issues of technology, consumption and business practice that have not traditionally been seen as central to musicology. I shall argue later in this article that they should be, because in today’s society performance - still primarily conceived by musicologists as a live event involving the physical co-presence of performers and listeners - has been so redefined as to embrace all of these. All the research reported in this volume can be seen as belonging to a larger movement of studying music as performance, a formulation that has been used from time to time by musicologists, but that is primarily associated with theatre studies: for instance, the principal American society for theatre studies, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, has a working group entitled “Music as Performance” (MAP).

To anyone unfamiliar with traditional musicology, the idea of music as performance might seem tautological: whoever thought of music as anything else? There are some very practical reasons why musicologists have tended to focus less on music as performance than on music as embodied in notated texts. The study of music as notation builds on an infrastructure of basic research carried out by successive generations of twentieth-century musicologists, the outcome of which is the extraordinarily comprehensive catalogues and finding aids originally issued in hard copy and now increasingly available on-line. Discographical work has lagged far behind, and though on-line resources are beginning to appear (with CHARM having made a major contribution in this area’), discovering what recordings were issued when, where, and by who remains in many cases a major obstacle. And that information is of limited value unless you can actually access a copy of the recording itself, which is hard (few sound archives have reliable online catalogues), and is likely to become harder as the international music industry pushes inexorably for longer copyright terms, regardless of the impact of such terms on public access to the heritage of recorded music.

But there are also deeper reasons for musicology’s focus on what might be termed music as literature, and these are historical, conceptual and even ideological. The status accorded to written documents as opposed to multimedia texts is symbolised by the fact that in some countries (including, at the time of writing, the UK) the copyright exceptions that enable routine text-based scholarship specifically exclude sound recordings and film. But more local disciplinary factors are also at work.

(1) CHARM’s home page is http://charm.kcl.ac.uk; the on-line discography (which includes much of The Gramophone Company’s output of 78 rpm discs, 78s and LPs from numerous US, UK, and other European companies, together with an electronic version of WERM, The World’s Encyclopedia of Recorded Music) may be found at http: //www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/discography/disco.html.

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The ghost in the machine: towards a musicology of recordings NICHOLAS COOK

Musicology came into being in the European context of nineteenth-century nationalism and the recovery, or construction, of national cultural heritages. In their focus on the editing of historical texts, seeking to remove the accretions of more recent ages and restore them to their pristine form, musicologists in effect treated their subject as a form ofwriting (Tomlinson, 2003, pp. 39-40). In other words their basic working methods, and the conceptual apparatus that supported them, assumed that musical works draw on the same kind of ontology as literary works (as poems, to make the analogy most complete, since it is possible to read poems aloud, but not necessary in order to understand their meaning). And seen in this context, “the musicology of performance” becomes less a tautology than an oxymoron.

All this is not to say that musicologists are unconcerned with performance (some are after all distinguished performers in their own right), or that musicology was unaffected by the “performative turn” that swept through a number of other disciplines in the last decades of the twentieth century. But in musicology this turn has taken some idiosyncratic forms. One example is the study of historical performance, an integral part of the “authenticity” movement that spread during this period from early music to ever more recent repertories. To be sure the scrutiny of historical treatises and notations, as well as the use of period instruments and copies, was a wholly justifiable reaction against the mainstream (a better term might be “one size fits all”) performance style of the post-war period. Yet the pattern that emerged was one in which scholars prescribed how performers should perform, and in which the embodied, real-time activity of performance was regulated by the written word. The same power structure can also be seen in the interhce between North American music theory and performance, as represented for example by the Performance and Analysis Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory. The basic premise of what I shall refer to as the page-to-stage approach, classically expressed in Wallace Berry’s 1989 book Musical Structure and Performance, is that score-based analysis - what music theorists do - reveals the essential structure of music, and the performer’s job is to ensure that this structure is adequately conveyed to the audience. Authority then is vested in the theorist: understanding flows in only one direction, from analysis to performance, from page to stage. Performance, in short, is studied as an epiphenonon of the score.

As an active performer himself, Berry clearly had no intention of belittling performance. That, however, was the consequence of the intellectual apparatus at his disposal, which was the legacy of the textualist orientation that went back to the foundation of the discipline. Indeed this scriptist approach to performance goes back much further than Berry. The same distinction between musical structure (the province of the analyst) and its communication to audiences (the province of the performer) may be found in the writings of Heinrich Schenker, the fin-de-sikle Viennese editor and teacher whose thinking continues to underpin theoretical approaches to the tonal repertory throughout the anglophone world. It is, incidentally, also found in cognitive-psychological approaches to performance,

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according to which abstract structures of various kinds are communicated through (Schenkerians would say “expressed by”) essentially systematic deployment of temporal, dynamic, and other forms of nuance: that is the basis of the remarkably close and in many ways productive convergence between music theorists and psychologists that took place from the 1970s on.

The prescriptive orientation of the page-to-stage approach to performance - prescriptive both in the sense of being authoritarian, and of being other than descriptive - might seem strange not just from a social-scientific perspective, but even from that of cultural studies in general. It becomes more understandable, however, when related to two other practices in which theorists interested in performance have frequently been involved. One is coaching: the asymmetrical relationship between the expert teacher and the practitioner remains when such activity is transported from the professional world of the repetiteur to the academic classroom or conference hall. (More generally, the term “theory” retains a pedagogical dimension in music that perhaps cannot be found in any other field.) The other is composition, which was at one time more integrally involved with North American music theory than is now the case. Berry was himself a composer (his biography in the online Encyclopedia ofMusic in Canada’ mentions several of his compositions and arrangements but none of his books), as was another highly influential proponent of structure-based performance, Edward T. Cone. And it is only natural for a composer to think in terms of the path from the score to its realisation in performance, that is, from page to stage. The result is that, in musicology, the performative turn - the idea of music as performance - did not undermine the hegemony of the text, as it did in theatre studies. O n the contrary, it reinforced it.

One of the criticisms that can be made of this whole approach is that it assumes an unproblematical mapping of analysis onto performance - of abstract structure onto embodied, real-time activity. An ongoing CHARM project which is not reported in the present volume addresses this issue by reading some of Schenker‘s analytical writings in light of contemporary recordings by performers whom Schenker admired (Cook, forthcoming a). One such performer was the pianist Eugene &Albert, who in 1905 made a piano roll of Schubert’s Impromptu O p 90 No. 3 - a piece to which Schenker devoted an analytical article published in 1924. Although it was not until the 1920s that Schenker developed his analytical method into the form in which it is now disseminated (the Schubert analysis is one of the first filly developed examples), the approach to performance as an expression of structure is set out in a treatise on which Schenker worked intensively around 191 1 but never ~omple ted :~ contemporary Schenkerian performance theory is basically a

(2) http ://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com, entry for ‘Berry, Wallace’ (accessed 31 December 2008). (3) These materials have been published in English translation as The Art of Performance (Schenker. 2000).

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The ghost in the machine: towards a musicology of recording NICHOLAS COOK

conflation of principles taken from the 191 1 treatise and the analytical method of the 1920s and 30s. So, even after making allowance for the fact that performers do not play the same every day, one might reasonably expect some degree of conformance between Schenker’s concept of structure and &Albert’s recording.

In fact just the opposite is the case. Schenkerian theory can be characterised as top-down: large-scale structural units - phrases, prolongational spans -are identified, and smaller details (whether of composition or performance) are interpreted in relation to those larger units. But D’Albert’s playing seems to work just the other way round, from the bottom up. Individual notes are selected for expressive emphasis, which he achieves through progressively decelerating as he approaches them, and then accelerating away from them. The result is a constantly changing tempo that might be described as a breathing-like alternation of inhalation and exhalation. Modern critics, however, have generally seen it as erratic or eccentric, which is hardly surprising since it is thoroughly at variance with present-day performance practice. What &Albert’s performance style does resemble, however, is the close description of how Op. 90 No. 3 should be played which Schenker provides in his article, following the strictly analytical section. Such close descriptions, or rather prescriptions, are a feature of Schenker’s analytical essays from the 1920s, though they have attracted very little attention from present-day theorists, for the obvious reason that Schenker is detailing a performance style that disappeared some eighty years ago. But what is particularly striking is that Schenker’s prescriptions for the performance of Op. 90 No. 3 have virtually no points of contact with his own structural analysis: as with &Albert’s playing, the shaping that Schenker prescribes, the points that he identifies for expressive emphasis, just do not map onto the Schenkerian structure. Two conclusions follow from this. First, Schenker’s analytical theory has been appropriated to rationalise or legitimise a structuralist style of performance - a product of post-war American modernism - that is almost diametrically opposed to Schenker‘s own sense of how music should go. Second, and more generally, the relationship between analytical theory and performance practice is far from the unproblematical mapping assumed by the page-to-stage approach.

To say that there is not an unproblematical mapping from analysis to performance is not, of course, to say that there can be no productive points of contact between the two fields. But it means that concepts transferred from the one to the other may need to be rethought, and this is the basic context for a CHARM project entitled “halysing motif in performance”. The concept of the motif, a characteristic compositional feature the direct or transformed modification of which creates musical coherence, is a mainstay of twentieth-century structural analysis, with a prehistory going back to the eighteenth century (Pritchard, 2009). A literal transfer of this concept from analysis to performance might suggest that performers should use tempo, dynamics or articulation to “bring out” such motives, as musicians say, and thereby express the music’s coherence. Theorists in the Berry tradition have attempted to refine this idea by distinguishing situations where such features should

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be brought out from those where they should not (for instance because the emphasis has been sufficiently “hard-wired into the composition). But the required rethinking goes further than this.

To begin an analysis with the score is effectively to rule out of consideration, before you have even begun, any aspects of music as performed that do not have some direct correlate in notation. But it is a cliche that the performer’s art lies between the notes, and a basic tenet of interdisciplinary performance theory (to which I shall return) is that performative meaning emerges from any and all dimensions of the performative event: as Baz Kershaw (1992) puts it, “no item in the environment of performance can be discounted as irrelevant to its impact” (p. 22). An analysis that treats performance as a process of generating meaning, rather than of simply reproducing a meaning that is already inherent in the score, will accordingly take as its starting point not the score but the performance itself, for example (but it is only an example) as captured in an audio recording. Moreover the analyst working in this area must guard against falling into established patterns of thought - that is, patterns of thought established through the analysis of notated music - and the obvious way of doing this is to work on the basis of empirical data, that is to say, from the bottom up. This is the approach adopted in the contribution to this volume by Neta Spiro, Nicolas Gold and John Rink, “The form of performance: analyzing pattern distribution in select recordings of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 24 No. 2”.

Essentially Spiro, Gold and Rink see performances in terms of patterns. As the dance-based genre of the Mazurka is based on a chacteristic metrical figure, they choose the individual bar as the basis for their analysis, breaking down each performance into a series of three-beat tempo and dynamic patterns. They use the self-organising map technique to classify the resulting patterns into a limited number of prototypes, and then look for significant patterns in the distibution of these prototypes. Since, like virtually all of Chopin’s mazurkas, Op. 24 No. 2 is made up of well defined four-bar phrases, they investigate how the distribution of prototypes corresponds to those phrases, and carry out a similar analysis in relation to larger formal sections; their conclusion is that whereas there is significant interaction between compositional structure and the organisation of performances, the extent of variation is such as to demonstrate the impact of thematic, motivic, generic and any number of other features. They also compare the distributions found in recordings by different pianists, seeking in this way to characterise aspects of those performers’ individual styles, and distinguish between performers who emphasize the sectional quality of the music, and those who project its through-composed aspects. They then carry out a similar series of analysis based on three recordings made over a twenty- seven year period by a single performer, Artur Rubinstein, showing how certain aspects of his interpretation remained consistent while others changed dramatically. Overall they discern a trend for variety to decrease across his three recordings, a trend which fits with the commonly held view that performance style has become increasingly standardised during the age of recording (more on this below). They

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comment, however, that no such trend is evident in the overall performance history of Op. 24 No. 2.

While interpretive constructs familiar from music theory emerge from the work of Rink and his co-workers - it would be strange if they did not - the starting point for the analysis is raw, quantitative data: that is the sense in which the approach is bottom-up, and the result is that hmiliar constructs appear in an unfamiliar light. What this shows is that in order to analyse performance, as opposed to analysing scores and applying the results to performance, it is necessary to construe the music in a different way. In the words of Roland Barthes (1977), we need “to change the musical object itself, as it presents itself to discourse” (p. 180). And two other CHARM projects illustrate hrther aspects of this change. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s project “Expressive gesture and style in Schubert song performance”, represented in this volume by his article “Performance style in Elena Gerhardt’s Schubert song recordings”, focuses precisely on artistry between the notes. Leech-Wilkinson uses a range of visualisation methods to identify key stylistic markers, linking them to the song texts and charting their distribution by means of statistical techniques. In this way he seeks to characterise Gerhardt’s highly individual performance style, a style that on the one hand reflected her historical situation - her relationship to the singers who came before and after her - but on the other hand had its origins in the strengths and limitations of her vocal apparatus and technique (as Leech-Wilkinson points out, Nikisch propelled her to fame and the recital hall before she had completed her studies).

Underlying Leech-Wilkinson’s argument is the claim that performers do not underline, bring out or express emotions that are already inherent in the score, as is assumed by scriptist approaches that reduce performance to reproduction: scores may prompt or afford a range of emotional expressions, but the emotional response itself is created by performers in the real time of performance, and the means by which they do this can be subjected to critical and historical analysis. And that, of course, explains how it is that different performers at different times have created such different meanings out of “the same” songs. Although the empirical dimension of Leech-Wilkinson’s article makes it look very different from the work of interdisciplinary performance theorists, the two approaches are in this way based on the same assumption - that meaning is created in the very act of performing, that performance is in this sense creative and not merely reproductive.

In its close reading of the minutiae of expressive performance, the focus of Leech- Wilkinson’s work is on what might be thought of as a level “below” that of score- based analysis (that is what I meant by artistry between the notes), and it is worth observing that it represents a continuation through modern technology of the pioneering research conducted in the 1930s by Carl Seashore and his associates at the University of Iowa. (In the intervening 70 years, performance practices have changed so radically that the ways of singing and playing which Seashore investigated as living tradition now have to be reconstructed from the always partial and

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problematical evidence of historical recordings.) But all musicology should, and a musicology of performance must, also concern itself with levels “above” that of score- based analysis, with its almost unremitting focus on the individual work. To give a specific example, we do not hear Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 33 No. 2 simply in relation to that individual work as embodied in the score (or rather “scores”, for with Chopin there is never such a thing as “the score”): we hear it in relation to such broader contexts as the mazurka as a genre, in other words in terms of a nexus of intertextual references from which any individual mazurka derives much of its meaning. In the same way, we hear Frederick Chiu’s 1999 recording of Op. 33 No. 2 in relation to the many other performances of that work, recorded or otherwise, which we may have experienced directly or which we experience at second or third hand through their absorption into current performance practices (including Chiu’s own playing). Performances, in other words, signify in large measure by virtue of the intricate networks of intertextual cross-reference that we refer to as style or tradition.

These terms are interlinked: one might say that style gives substance to tradition (that is what a tradition is a tradition o j , or that a tradition is a style viewed diachronically. The trouble is that neither term has a well established meaning within contemporary musicology, at least in relation to performance. The concept of style played a crucial role in Guido Adler‘s 1885 formulation of the nature and scope of the discipline, and retained a central role until around the time of the Second World War. For reasons that are not entirely clear but were associated with its appropriation by the totalitarian regimes of the time, the concept fell strongly out of fashion in the 1950s: its place was taken on the one hand by ethnomusicological approaches based on the relationship between any given music and its individual cultural context, and on the other by music-analytical approaches that emphasized how the significance of any given musical feature depends on its larger structural context. As symbolised by Schoenberg’s opposition of “style” and “idea” (set out in an essay of 1946 and adopted as the title of the most widely disseminated edition of his writings), the result was that style was reduced to a residual category: it was the inessential, whatever was left over once the essential had been defined in scriptist terms. All this only reinforced the longstanding musicological emphasis on the score, and diverted scholarly attention from important levels at which performances signi6. If Leech- Wilkinson’s article of Gerhardt is a much delayed continuation of research begun by Seashore between the wars, then his concern with issues of style is another reversion to a long abandoned musicological agenda.

Georgia Volioti‘s “Playing with tradition: weighting up similarity and the buoyancy of the game”, included in this volume, attempts to address some of these fundamental issues head-on. One of Volioti’s particular concerns is the relationship between on the one hand the reified concepts of style and tradition proposed by theorists and historians, and on the other the role of individual agency. Another is the extent to which cultural concepts such as tradition are capable of being investigated by the use of empirical methods; Volioti explores this through comparing

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tempo data from a large number of recordings of Grieg’s “Butterfly”, seeking to distinguish relationships which are musicologically meaningful from those which are not by triangulating the tempo data with other forms of evidence. Her conclusions are that performance characteristics are largely the result of historically contingent factors, which means that stylistic groupings based solely on empirical data may easily be specious; that influence is an active rather than a passive process (performers choose to be influenced by other performers, so that agency is always involved); and that tradition is not something that simply exists in its own terms, but rather a cultural construct that emerges from the dialogue between the historian-analyst and the evidence handed down from the past. (The last part ofVolioti’s title is a reference to Hans-Georg Gadamer.)

Another CHARM project, not reported in this volume, throws further light on the relationship between structural principles and historical contingency, as well as providing an example of how empirical findings can be brought to bear on the cultural issues that lie at the heart of mainstream musicology (Cook 2009, forthcoming b). This project, based on tempo and dynamic data drawn from 52 recordings of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 63 No. 3, focusses on the widely documented phenomenon of phrase arching, the tendency of performers to get faster and louder as they play into a musical phrase, and slower and softer as they come out of it. This forms the basis of Neil Todd‘s (1 985; 1992) model of musical expressivity, according to which tempo and dynamic curves are generated at multiple levels (such as 2,4 and 8 bars) and integrated into overall performed profiles. Of course this model cannot be wholly deterministic: as Todd says, tempo and dynamics do not always occur in the strictly synchronised manner his model predicts, and after all, different pianists play differently. All the same, Todd (1 992) proposes that his model represents “a kind of normative default mode of performance” (p. 3542). Indeed he suggests that the experience of expressive performance draws on the general cognitive mechanisms that give rise to the sense of self-motion, and that this is why phrase arching sounds so “natural” (p. 3549).

Todd, in short, explains phrase arching in terms of general psychological principles, which is to say that he does not see it as in essence a socially or historically constructed practice. It follows that, if Todd is right, we should expect to find phrase arching throughout the recorded legacy. Obviously there are severe limits on the weight that can be placed on a study based on a single mazurka, but the data from Op. 63 No. 3 does not support such an interpretation. Phrase arching of the kind that Todd described is indeed found in these recordings, but its distribution is fir from uniform. Both tempo and dynamic arching are represented among the earliest recordings of Op. 63 No. 3 (which date from the 1920s), but they are not found together. Though the reasons are fir from clear, several studies have shown that there were drastic changes in performance style around the time of the Second World War: it was then that many pianists began to lock both tempo and dynamics to the composed phrase arching, at the same time eliminating most of the expressive or rhetorical details that

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characterised earlier playing (such as that of Ignaz Friedman), and so displacing the locus of expression from the moment-to-moment unfolding of the music to a larger, structural level. Such structuralist performances might be said to present expressiveness as an aspect of the music itself, rather than as the subjective creation of the performer, and this is very much in line with the machine aesthetic, the cult of objectivity, that permeated the arts in the years before and after the war. In this way, as one might reasonably expect, the performance of music from the past can be understood as part of contemporary culture, responding to and indeed part of the same aesthetic, social and ideological forces as other cultural practices of the time.

So summarised, this study might be thought to be replacing Todd’s ahistorical model of performance expression by a totalising historical narrative which allows no more space than Todd’s model for individual agency: pianists, it would seem, are reduced to vehicles for the operation of impersonal historical processes. But the picture is actually far messier than that would suggest. For one thing, fully coordinated phrase arching of the Todd type is strongly (though by no means exclusively) associated with Russian pianists, or more accurately with pianists associated in some way with Russian musical culture, for instance through having studied at the Moscow conservatory. And whereas one may be led to play in a certain way to please one’s teacher or to impress competition juries, the adoption of fully coordinated phrase arching always represents some kind of choice on the performer’s part, because you don’t have to play like that: from the 1920s to the present day there have been many performers whose playing of this mazurka displays little or no phrase arching as Todd would define it. From this two conclusions follow. The first is that, understood in this manner, style history still allows room for the exercise of individual agency; it is, in fact, a history of performers’ choices. The second - at which I have already hinted in relation to &Albert - is that structuralist performance, as exemplified by fully coordinated phrase arching, should not be seen as a paradigm case, the embodiment of general principles applicable to all performance. It is simply a stylistic option.

Certainly it is the case, as Volioti argues, that there are severe limits on what empirical analysis of performance can prove by itself: the problem with much musicological writing that adopts empirical methods is that it stops where the data stops, rather than using the data as a jumping-off point for the more informal and listening-based critical or historical intepretation that gives musicology its raison d’ttre. For one thing, empirical methods can help to refine listening experience: Leech- Wilkinson’s article reports the results of listening sharpened by objective visualisations, and may instigate in his readers a more informed and searching experience of the music. For another, empirical methods can be of value as a means of regulating more informal critical and historical interpretation. In the short period since serious scholarship on the history of recorded performance began (which more or less means since the publication of Robert Philip’s 1992 book Early Recordings andMusica1 Sqle), a number of grand historical narratives have acquired the status of received wisdom,

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such as that of the impact of recording technology on performance style: because performances were now listened to over and over again, the argument goes, not only were very fast tempi eliminated but also the impressionistic coordination of older, more event-oriented performances became increasingly disciplined, resulting in an increasingly standardised performance style. In effect, it was the gramophone rather than the concert that became the arbiter of performance style.

Ofcourse there must be some truth in this interpretation; indeed the development of fully coordinated phrase arching might be seen as itself representing a process of standardisation. But almost any empirical study seems to throw up as many exceptions to this narrative as examples of it, in this way controverting the thesis of progressive standardisation. (As we saw, this thesis may apply to Rubinstein’s three recordings of Chopin’s Op. 24 No. 2, but it does not apply to the history of recordings of that work as a whole.) There are two reasons why these ubiquitous exceptions become lost in the formation of grand narratives, both of which have to do with purely listening-based research processes. One is that the musical ear, while highly sensitive and flexible, is also highly malleable, meaning that there is a tendency to hear what you expect to hear: empirical data provides a means of cutting through what can easily become a vicious circle of interpretation. The other is that, because close listening is a laborious and time-consuming process, such listening-based narratives are necessarily based on the use of a limited number of “representative” examples, which poses an obvious problem: until you have studied everything, how can you know what examples are representative, or what they are representative of!

My study of Op. 63 No. 3 provides a case in point. Without the empirical data for all 52 recordings, I would have focussed my study on those that contributed to my narrative: the recordings from the 1920s that either do not feature phrase arching (such as Ignaz Friedman’s), or that feature it in tempo or dynamics but not both (Sergei Rachmanonov and Vladimir de Pachmann); the streamlined interpretations of the immediate post-war period that feature fully coordinated phrase arching (Halina Czerny-Stefanska and Heinrich Neuhaus); and the continuing performance tradition represented in particular by Russian pianists such as Vera Gornostaeva and Grigory Sokolov. But this would have been quite misleading, because it would have ignored the very large number of recordings from all periods that are not representative of this narrative. A case could be made that grand narratives of performance style, however appealing, will continue to be premature until there is sufficient empirical data to justify the belief that there is such a thing as “performance style”, rather than a complex pattern of interlocking interpretive practices that may be not just heterogeneous but quite different in music belonging to different genres, or performed by different instrumental or vocal forces. For the time being the jury is out on this quite fundamental question.

I have argued that empirical approaches, when deployed in conjunction with other musicological approaches, need not be incompatible with the recognition either of historical agency and contingency, or of the generation of meaning in the

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act of performance. At the same time, as I said, there is a striking difference in appearance between the empirically-based research featured in this volume and most writing by drama theorists and other practitioners of interdisciplinary performance studies. Theatre studies came into being as a secession from literary studies, and has retained a suspicion of textualist approaches - including empirical methods that would appear to treat performances (especially recorded performances) as quasi-texts rather than traces of or prompts to the real time, evanescent action in which meaning emerges. And in musicology there is a suspicion that recordings have opened up a whole new territory in which analysts can ply their trade without rethinking their long established scriptist assumptions: audio texts are still texts, if that is how you treat them. The most obvious way in which to avoid this danger is to focus on the social contexts within which recordings are produced (in the concert hall or studio, control room, or editing suite) or consumed (in the home, car, or underground train). It is then in order to concentrate on the other side of the picture that CHARM’S successor centre, the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, is focussing its research on ethnographic studies: of performers’ perceptions of gesture and shape, of the conservatory teaching studio, of the creation of contemporary concert music, and of orchestral ensembles in world music.

But the social is already inscribed in the auditory trace, if you know how to look for it. Peter Jeffrey (1 992), working in conjunction with the ethnomusicologist Kay Shelemay, made sense of Gregorian chant notations by understanding them as the traces of the kind of performative and improvisatory practices still current in some non-Western cultures: in the same way, audio and indeed video recordings can be understood as the partial and mediated traces of performance events, which are more or less by definition multimedia1 wholes in which sound is interpreted alongside the sight of performers’ stage presentation; the texts embodied in programme notes; and the many other, less tangible dimensions of any social gathering. (In many - actually most - contexts, especially popular-musical, the performance event may be virtual rather than real, so that the recording is less a trace than a prompt to the listener’s imagination, but that does not affect my basic point.) A follow-up to the phrase- arching project I have already described explored this idea (Cook, forthcoming c). It was based this time on video recordings of Op. 63 No. 3, and took as its point of departure the claim by a leading interdisciplinary performance theorist, Philip Auslander, that it is more productive to see musicians as performing their own personae than in the manner in which musicologists see them, as performing musical works: as Auslander (2006) puts it, “to think of music as performance is to foreground performers and their concrete relationships to audiences, rather than the question of the relationship between musical works and performances” (p. 117). (Auslander is the founder of the Music as Performance working group to which I referred.)

By “persona” Auslander means not performers’ own, everyday identities but rather the fictive identities that are constructed through the totality of their professional activity. His point is self-evident as applied to Madonna or Prince, but

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it applies with hardly less force to, for example, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. ATV performance of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 33 No. 4 from 1962 shows Michelangi wiping the keyboard with a cloth and then mopping his cheeks, putting down the cloth, clasping his hands together with a washing-like motion, and rubbing his right hand on his thigh before he starts playing. Everything is done in a studiedly unhurried manner, including the elegant arc of his right hand as he lifts it from his thigh to bring it smoothly down onto the keyboard: the performance has begun long before the first note is played, and its ritualistic quality has less to do with the performance of Op. 33 No. 4 than that of Michelangeli’s persona - the aloof, inaccessible artist whose career was built in part on his legendary concert cancellations.

But the main part of this study was based on a video performance of Op. 63 No. 3 by Grigory Sokolov (the first of five encores from his concert at the ThCatre des Champs-Elysges, on 4 November 2002). Sokolov’s performance is marked by an extraordinarily elaborate physical choreography. He crouches low over the keyboard, often swaying his torso from side to side as he plays. He shapes expressive notes through physical gestures, creating visual accents when his hand flies up after an attack, or keeping his finger in contact with the key and twisting his hand onto its side and back again, so heightening the sustain and even creating the illusion of a crescendo-diminuendo. Actually it’s not an illusion at all: that is, there is a real sense of swelling and dying away, it’s just that it is achieved in the visual rather than the auditory domain. As in any multimedia event, the seen and the heard work together, giving rise to what is as much a performance of virtuoso pianism, or simply of Sokolov, as it is of Op. 63 No. 3. By contrast other video performances of Op. 63 No. 3, not commercially released but available on YouTube, perform quite different identities: in a solo recital at the Mannes College of Music, Irina Morozova (who teaches in their Preparatory division) associates herself with the tradition of the sublime not only through the dream-like quality of her playing, but also through the repeated lifting of her gaze to the ceiling, a gesture redolent of the ineffable (and seen on a thousand record sleeves); in the less formal surroundings of a French chateau, Julien Duchoud establishes an intimacy with his audience (some ofwhom are sitting very close to him) through playing from the music, the effect being heightened by the desk light perched on the piano, creating a pool of light in the dimly lit room.

It doesn’t require empirical analysis to realise that the effect of these performances emerges from the interaction between sight and sound, from the well-honed audiovisual ballet of Sokolov’s encore to the extemporaneous quality of Duchoud’s playing, with its sense of the music unfolding almost unpredictably from moment to moment. (It is not by accident that I am using almost the same words that I applied to Friedman’s playing.) But empirical analysis both clarifies exactly how these effects are being generated, and sets them into a larger context of performance practice. Sokolov’s performance, as I mentioned, is a classic example of Russian-style (which is to say Todd-style) phrase arching: the resulting hypermetrical regularity establishes

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a structural framework firm enough to support his extravagant gestural choreography, which might otherwise collapse into self-indulgent incoherence. By contrast, there is hardly any trace of phrase arching in Duchoud's performance: that is partly what gives it what I referred to as its extemporaneous quality (and the same applies to Friedman). In this way, approaches drawn from interdisciplinary performance studies, and oriented - as Kershaw said - towards all aspects of the performance event, help to reveal the meaning created in the course of performance, while empirical approaches, based on the extrapolation of specific aspects such as timing and dynamics, help to reveal how it is that performances mean what they mean.

I return now to the claim I made near the beginning of this article that mechanical, electrical and digital technologies have progressively redefined performance: technology and business practices would at one time have been considered mere vehicles for the dissemination of music, and therefore peripheral or extraneous to the study of the music itself, whereas I am claiming that they must now be seen as central to an understanding of music as performance. I referred earlier to the performative turn, but this was really just an offshoot of a larger and earlier intellectual process: the development of reception history, which over the last fifty years has had a great deal of impact on the musicological understanding of compositions. As such obvious examples as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony make abundantly clear, meaning is not simply composed into the score: rather it is codetermined by the attributes of the score and by the social practices of reception and interpretation, as evidenced by reviews, scholarly interpretations or works of literature. This should have provided a perfect context for the analysis of performance as a form of reception o r interpretation history, and there has been a certain amount of work along these lines. But it has not been pursued very vigorously, which was only to be expected in view of the deeply embedded patterns of scriptist thought I have already described. Indeed the authentic performance movement can be seen as having actually inhibited the development of a musicology of performance understood in terms of reception: through their emphasis on the authority of composers' intentions, the period performance ideologues reinforced the hegemony of the producer at the expense of the role of the receiver. Such intention-based discourses would have seemed hopelessly outdated in practically any other intellectual field.

What might not have been expected is the way in which the same kind of one- way thinking, from production to reception, was applied to recordings. Just as musicologists saw performance as a vehicle for the communication of the work rather than as an intrinsically creative practice, so recordings were seen by classical- music critics as at best a way of communicating performances, and at worst an ersatz substitute for them; within popular music, similar thinking was perpetuated by rock's own authenticity movement. The gradual development of a musicology of performance has entailed the rolling back of such one-way thinking as applied to both performances and recordings, or to put it positively, a successive rolling forward

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of the idea of creativity from composers to performers, producers, and sound engineers (insofar as these these still denote distinct individuals or even different functions), as well as to listeners in both public and private spaces (insofir as they, too, can be distinguished in the age of the Pod). In other words the paradigm of creativity inherited from an earlier phase of musicology, which was inextricably wrapped up with the figure of Beethoven, has given way to the idea that meaning is produced through collaboration: creativity is distributed across the multiple agents of musical culture, and it is the potential to develop this insight that explains the word “Creative” in the title of CHARM’S successor centre.

Studio practices and cultures of consumption, both key areas in the evolving musicology of recordings, figured strongly in the series of residential symposia that also formed part of CHARM’S programme. And a final project, “Recording and performance style”, represented in this volume by two articles, explored the interaction of technology, business history and performance style, focussing primarily on the Anglo-American recording industry in the second half of the 1920s. As David Patmore explains in his contribution, “The Columbia Graphophone Company, 1923-1 931: commercial competition, cultural plurality and beyond”, this is the tumultuous period that began with global competition between the Gramophone Company and Columbia, and ended in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash with their merger to create EMI, arguably the world‘s dominant record company throughout most of the twentieth century (though at the time ofwriting undergoing painful and possibly terminal restructuring). It was also a period of accelerating style change in musical performance, and the key question raised by Patmore’s study is the extent to and manner in which, even at this relatively early stage, the destinies of the record industry and of performance style were wrapped up with one another. By contrast, Nick Morgan’s ‘‘X new pleasure’: listening to National Gramophonic Society records, 1924-1931” investigates an often neglected dimension in the early history of recordings: that of the listener. By focussing on individual members of Compton MacKenzie’s short-lived record club, Morgan recreates the world within which the 78 rpm discs of the 1920s were consumed - a world in which, as has perhaps always been the case with recordings, self-improvement merges imperceptibly into sometimes unexpected pleasure.

Is this research best described as business history, reception history, the history of technology, sociology or musicology? It is not mere post-disciplinary cant to say that it is all of these: rather like a rope, commercial, technological, social and musical factors are so tightly intertwined as to constitute a single, if complex, historical process. To make sense of one of these strands it is necessary to understand the relationship between all of them. Combine this with the empirical, cultural and indeed aesthetic perspectives that emerge from the analytically-oriented articles in the first part of this volume, and it is easy to see why the prospect of a fully developed musicology of performance - or more simply, the study of music as performance - is so daunting, and yet so appealing.

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Nicholas Cook Faculty of Music University of Cambridge West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP. UK

[email protected] 18




REFERENCES

Auslander, l? (2006). Musical personae, The Drama Review, 50/1, 100-119. Barthes, R (1977). Image music text (S. Heath, Ed., Trans.). London: Fontana. Berry, W. (1989). Musicalstructure andperformance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cook, N. (2009). Squaring the circle: Analysing phrase arching in recordings of Chopin’s

mazurkas. Musica Humana, 1,528. Cook, N. (forthcoming a). Off the record: Performance, history, and musical logic. In I. Deliege

(Ed.), Music and the mind Investigating the firnctions and processes of music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cook, N. (forthcoming b). Objective expression: Analysing phrase arching in recordings of Chopin’s mazurkas. In G. Barth and K. Arul (Eds.), Reactions to the record: Perspectives on historical pe rformance.

Cook, N. (forthcoming c). Bridging the unbridgeable? Empirical musicology and interdisciplinary performance studies. In N. Cook and R Pettengill (Eds.), Music as performance: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Jeffrey, l? (1995). Re-envisioning past musical cultures: Ethnomusicology in the study of Gregorian chant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kershaw, B. (1992). The politics ofperformance: Radical theatre as cultural intervention. London: Routledge.

Philip, R. (1992). Early recordings and musical style Changing tastes in instrumental performance, 1900-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pritchard, M. (2009). Analysis and melody in late Beethoven (Doctoral dissertation). Royal Holloway, University of London.

Schenker, H. (2000). The Art ofperformance (H. Esser, Ed.; I. Schreier Scott, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Todd, N. (1985). A model of expressive timing in tonal music. Music Perception, 3, 33-57. Todd, N. (1992). The dynamics of dynamics: A model of musical expression. Journal of the

Acoustical Society of America, 91, 3540-3 5 5 0. Todinson, G. (2003). Musicology, anthropology, history. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert & R

Middleton (Eds.), The cultural study of music: A critical introduction (pp. 31-44). New York: Routledge.

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El fantasma de la rnaquina: hacia una musicologia de las grabaciones

Este articulo sirve de introduccibn a las otras contribuciones de este segundo volurnen de Musicae Scientiae dedicado al trabajo del Centro de Investigacibn de la Historia y Antdisis de la Mljsica Grabada (CHARM), y las sitha en el context0 rnis arnplio de la investigacibn rnusicolbgica sobre la interpretacibn musical grabada. Las relaciones de la rnusicologia histbrica con la interpretacibn son escasas, incluyendo la interpretacibn de rnljsica histbrica y lo que se conoce corno la aproxirnacibn "de la pigina a la escena", dentro de la reciente teoria musical : 10s proyectos analiticos de CHARM se centran sobre aspectos pasados por alto en la aproxirnacibn que se basa en la partitura, corno el potencial de 10s rnbtodos de abajo a arriba, y la naturaleza del estilo de la interpretacibn y el grado que puede ser significativarnente analizado por 10s rnktodos ernpiricos. Otra linea de investigacibn de CHARM analizb el grado en que las pricticas cornerciales de la industria de la rnljsica grabada ayudan a dar forrna a la interpretacibn en el siglo XX. El autor incluye breves resljrnenes de sus propios proyectos con CHARM con la intencibn de proporcionar una visibn general de 10s trabajos del Centro corn0 un todo.

Nicholas Cook, II fantasma nella macchina: verso una rnusicologia delle incisioni

Questo articolo introduce i contributi a questa seconda pubblicazione di Musicae Scientiae dedicata al lavoro del Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) (Centro di ricerca per la storia e I'analisi della rnusica incisa) dell'AHRC, collocandoli nel contest0 pib arnpio della ricerca rnusicologica sull'esecuzione musicale incisa. E' indagato il rapport0 storicarnente diseguale della rnusicologia con I'esecuzione, inclusa la rnusica colta e cib che e denorninato come approccio 'page-to-stage' alla recente teoria musicale : i progetti analitici del CHARM si sono concertati su aspetti trascurati dall'approccio basato sulla partitura, ovvero sul potenziale dei rnetodi bottom-up e sulla natura di uno stile esecutivo e il lirnite entro cui cib pub essere significativarnente analizzato attraverso rnetodi ernpirici. Un altro settore dell'attiviti di ricerca del CHARM indaga fino a che punto le pratiche cornrnerciali dell'industria discografica contribuiscano a modellare l'esecuzione nel Ventesirno secolo. Cautore include brevi resoconti dei suoi progetti con il CHARM fornendo una panorarnica dell'attiviti del Centro.

9 Le fant6rne dans la machine : vers une musicologie des enregistrements rnusicaux

Cet article est I'introduction aux autres contributions de ce second nurnero de Musicae Scientiae dedie au travail du CHARM - Research Centre for the Hlstory and Analysis of Recorded Music. II place ces contributions dans le contexte plus large de la recherche rnusicologique des interpretations musicales enregistrees. On

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The ghost In the machine: towards a musicology of recordings NICHOLAS COOK

considkre la curieuse relation historique entre la musicologie e t I'interprktation, y cornpris I'interpretation historiquement 'kduquke' e t ce que I'on designe cornme I'approche 'de la partition 2 la sckne' de la rkcente thkorie musicale. Les projets d'analyse du CHARM se sont centres sur les aspects nkgligks par I'approche baske sur la partition, sur le potentiel des methodes ascendantes - methodes 'bottom-up', et sur la nature du style de I'interprktation, e t jusqu'a quel point elle peut 6tre significativement analyske par les rnkthodes ernpiriques. Un autre fil conducteur des recherches du CHARM a explore jusqu'oir les pratiques comrnerciales de I'industrie du disque aident a determiner des interprktations du vingtieme sikcle. Cauteur inclut de brefs compte rendus de ses propres projets avec le CHARM afin de fournir une vision globale du travail de ce Centre de Recherche.

Der Ceist in der Maschine: Zu einer Musikwissenschaft von Tonaufzeichnungen

Dieser Artikel bietet eine Einfuhrung in die weiteren Beitrage dieser zweiten Ausgabe von Musicae Scientiae, die der Arbeit des AHRC-Forschungszentrurns zur Geschichte und Analyse von Tonaufnahrnen (CHARM) gewidmet ist. Die Beitrage werden dabei in den grofieren Kontext der rnusikwissenschaftlichen Forschung zu Tonaufzeichnungen von musikalischen Darbietungen gesetzt. Dabei wird die historisch seltsame Beziehung der Musikwissenschaft zu musikalischen lnterpretationen beruhrt, unter Einbeziehung von historisch informierten Darbietungen und den so genannten ,,Vom-Blatt-zur-BDhne"-Herangehensweisen der neueren Musiktheorie. Die analytischen Projekte von CHARM fokussieren Aspekte, die durch Partitur basierte Ansatze ubersehen wurden und das Potenzial fur Bottom-up-Methoden haben. AuBerdem beschaftigen sie sich rnit der Art der lnterpretationsstile sowie dern Grad, bis zu welchem ernpirische Methoden sinnvoll zur Analyse einsetzbar sind. Ein weiterer Strang der CHARM-Forschung untersucht, inwieweit die kommerziellen Praktiken der Tontragerindustrie geholfen haben, Interpretationen irn 20. Jahrhundert zu pragen. Der Autor bezieht kurze Darstellungen seiner eigenen Projekte rnit CHARM ein, urn einen Uberblick uber die Arbeiten des Forschungszentrurns insgesamt zu geben.

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