The Changing Sound of Music:

Approaches to Studying Recorded

Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Document Contents

• 1. Introduction
o 1.1. Musicology and performances
o 1.2. Musicology and recordings
1.2.1. Expertise beyond musicology
1.2.2. Record reviewing
1.2.3. Metaphor
o 1.3. Why now?
o 1.4. What will this book do?

1. Introduction
1.1. Musicology and performances

¶1 The idea of studying performances, in the plural, may seem strange. Studying music
has generally meant either studying performance, at a conservatory for example, or
studying musical works and ideas about music, as typically happens in universities. But
why would we study performances? Are they worth studying? Are they not too
ephemeral, too unpredictable, too whimsical to teach us anything useful about music?
Or, in the case of studio recordings, too artificial? And anyway, how would we do it?
Would it involve taking that analytical and historical approach to music that universities
have fostered and applying it to performance? Or is it something that conservatory
students would do by listening in order to refine their own playing or singing? And why
would it be interesting? Surely it’s the work itself that deserves our attention, not what
some performer has done with it.

¶2 If you’re a performer I hope you found that last sentence as infuriating as I do. Why
do academics and (on occasion) critics have such a low opinion of performers compared
to the almost limitless respect they seem willing to afford composers? If you’re a
scholar you may feel that there’s an important truth in the long-standing belief that
works endure while performances pass by. But in that case I hope I’ll be able to
persuade you that performances are much more the work than we have traditionally
supposed, that performance traditions influence the ways we think about works over
long periods of time, and that performers have things to teach us about pieces of music
that are every bit as interesting and true as the most subtle analyses and commentaries.

¶3 It’s certainly the case, though, that up till now musicology has not seen performance
this way. On the contrary, musicology, when it’s dealt with performance at all, has seen
its own role as educative, telling performers how they ought to play a piece, either in
order to accord with an analyst’s view of the structure of a work, or in order to
reproduce a historical performance practice ‘appropriate’ to it. The idea that performers
might have something to teach musicologists has, until quite recently, been
inconceivable. 1 One could probably argue, with some historical support, that this wasn’t
always so. As we shall see in the next section, the rise of musicology, from about 1800,
coincides (and it can hardly be coincidence) with a relatively rapid change in attitudes to
music. Music of the past became interesting for the first time just when the focus for
thought about music changed from concern with its effect in performance towards
concern with a piece’s inherent nature. A piece became less a sequence of sounds that
pleased the ear and more a creative statement of a gifted mind. It became a work: the
outstandingly gifted composer became a genius. 2 Musicology developed partly in order
to enable us to understand how music had reached this exalted state (music history), and
partly in order to explain the work of genius (music analysis).

¶4 This shift of attention away from performance towards the composer and his work
brought a number of advantages. Some were commercial: it was possible to exploit and
market works much more widely than performances. Some were intellectual:
concentrating on the work gave one a text to study, something one could see and write
about in such a way that one’s readers could check one’s insights against a score and
learn to share them. Some were spiritual: by studying composers’ works it became
possible to conceive music as a procession and at the same time as a progression in
which each composer and each work took its proper place; an immensely reassuring and
optimistic view of one’s place at the pinnacle of musical achievement so far.

¶5 Of all these, the most significant from our perspective is the view of music as
founded in a notated text. From the later Middle Ages onwards, notation contributed
increasingly to the transmission of music from person to person and from place to place,
so that by the time music came to be identified with musical works notation was able to
provide a quite detailed representation of those aspects of works thought to be the most
essential. Not surprisingly, then, works and scores became increasingly synonymous.
What the composer wrote down gradually came to matter rather a lot, and musicologists
increasingly (especially from the later nineteenth century onwards) saw one of their
most important functions as ensuring that published scores presented precisely the notes
put down by the composer. As a consequence, performers in the twentieth century were
increasingly expected to follow that notation strictly and without deviation, and analysts
increasingly believed that by studying the written notes they could reach an
understanding of the essence of the work. The piece became its notation to the extent
that in English ‘the music’ came to mean ‘the score’, as in ‘I’m just going to look at the
music’. It takes a moment’s thought, now that this way of thinking is so ingrained, to
see why that phrase is oxymoronic.

¶6 Towards the end of the last century a backlash against the text-driven view of music
began to strike. Partly it was a reaction against the idea that the accurate reproduction of
a composer’s text produced an accurate representation of the composer’s intentions—so
that the notion of historically informed performance came under attack. Partly it was
reaction against the idea that analysis could explain the meaning of musical works—so
that music began to be seen as a representation of a culture rather than as a self-
contained autonomous art form. Both these trends have brought welcome doses of
realism into the world of academic music, the one allowing once again the possibility
that performers might have something to bring to scores; the other making it easier,
after a century of rampant pseudo-science, for musicologists to admit that what music
means depends not just on what it consists of but also, and to a very large extent, on
who we are. But even so, musicology is still, for the most part, operating with the notion
that works are one category of music and performances another.

¶7 Something else that has made performances hard to think of studying has been the
problem of talking about music as sound. A performance is not simply a neutral
representation of the pitches and durations notated in a score. Most details of a sequence
of sounds cannot be specified in existing notations. If a notation capable of specifying
every detail were developed, no human performer would be able to realise it. And yet
those details do play an essential role in how music is perceived, which in turn feeds
back, as we shall see, into how it is performed. A musicology that took account of more
of this information would have to have a means of observing and considering it in
detail. But sound is extremely hard to discuss in non-scientific terms, much harder than
the sensations through which we perceive the other arts. One can talk about how a
painting looks, without having to invoke measurement, in far more detail than one can
talk about how a piece of music sounds: light is not just described as bright or dark,
there is a rich vocabulary of words we can use to discuss colour and shape. Even touch
can be described in several ways, hard, soft, rough, smooth. We talk about sound much
more than touch, but the only words we use that are specific to hearing are loud and
quiet; every other word we use is borrowed from another sense (bright, dark, hard, soft,
sweet, silvery) or identifies the sound producer (percussive, brassy) or a style of
behaviour (bold, timid) or a kind of motion (liquid, halting). In the same way as with
scent (something smells of raspberries, or is lemony) we can talk about musical sound
most easily by imagining what it is like. We use metaphor and simile, in other words.
(There are good reasons why, and we shall come to them.) But that is not a lot of help if
one is trying to explain precisely how sounds work in relation to one another, which is
something musicology has become very good at by restricting its attention to the things
specified in scores.

¶8 It’s also true to say that a lack of vocabulary both results in and is symptomatic of a
lack of perception. We don’t actually notice sound very much when we listen to music.
Those of us trained so thoroughly that we can write knowledgeably about music tend to
hear it, instead, in terms of the categories in which we’ve been taught to think of
music—melody, harmony, variation, development, and so on—all things that can be
seen relatively easily in a score. The precise ways in which those categories are
presented in a performance, and the quality of sound at any moment, are generally
things to which we pay less attention. Consequently, although it may seem self-evident
if one stops to think about it that this is what music is, musicology tends not to think
that a piece of music is the sensual experience of hearing it.

¶9 Yet sound is an ever-present factor in our response to music. What music does to us,
it does not just through the interaction of pitch material organised into form, but also by
changes or irregularities (often minute) in loudness and timing, changes that, by a
process we shall study in later chapters, produce changes in the way we feel. Music is
not so much a thing ‘out there’ as an interaction between sound and a hearer (who may
also be a performer); it happens in the hearer, not in the score. But to acknowledge that,
one must also admit that music involves performance. Without that admission, an
appreciation of the quality of sound, its constantly varying details, and its role in
generating emotional responses to music, is unlikely. Put together the difficulty of
considering sound with the belief that the composer deposits music in a score, and one
arrives at a mentality in which performance must inevitably seem peripheral.

¶10 By contrast, in most cultures of the world, and in most musical subcultures in the
West, music only happens in performance. Apart from those who study western
classical music, what people everywhere mean by ‘music’ is something that one does
and listens to. That’s not to say that musicology has been wrong to use notation as a
medium through which to study music, or to use the notion of a work as a heuristic,
making possible certain kinds of thoughts that are useful but that would otherwise be
extremely hard to have. Musicology has achieved extraordinary things, and has had a
profound (and, since it has begun to train composers, an ever-increasing) influence on
composition, which to an extent has made its approach increasingly appropriate. But
musicology has achieved much of this at the expense of the otherwise universally-
shared sense that how music sounds while one hears it is fundamental to what it is, and
at the cost of isolating itself from the vast audience of music lovers who seek to
understand what they experience.

¶11 Perhaps this may help us understand why musicology is peripheral to the interests
of most lovers of music. Nicholas Cook, in his book Music, Imagination, and Culture,
distinguishes between ‘musical’ and ‘musicological’ listening, the former being what
most people do (including, Cook suggests, musicologists when they are listening for
pleasure), while musicological listening focuses on hearing the kinds of things that
musicology studies. What seems to be happening is that, while all listening to music
uses general principles of auditory organisation—grouping sounds, for example, in
order to identify relationships between them, or interpreting them in order to assess the
information they signal—expert listeners will tend to group sounds by their
understanding of the grouping of musical materials in composition—for example
hearing relationships between themes and between tonal areas—and to assess meaning
in terms of the function of those musical materials in a musical structure, while non-
experts will tend to group sounds by their proximity in time, and to interpret their
meaning in terms of their inherent beauty and the kinds of memories and associations
they seem to evoke. It seems very likely that musicians hear the things non-musicians
hear but ignore them to a considerable degree when listening musicologically. Much
less certain is that non-musicians hear the kinds of groupings musicians do, but
recognise them only subconsciously, although this is what music analysis has tended to
suggest in order to substantiate its claim to be revealing truths about how music works.
A sceptical view of the claims of musicological listeners might lead one, as Cook
suggests, to ‘conclude from all this that the conventional theory of music, in which
sonata forms, tonal structures, and thematic relationships play so large a part, is no more
than a theory of unheard forms, imaginary structures, and fictitious relationships’. 3
Cook quotes the musical phenomenologist, Thomas Clifton, to the same effect: ‘…for
the listener, musical grammar and syntax amount to no more than wax in his ears.’ 4

¶12 It seems hard to deny that musicology has made relatively little impression on most
listeners to western classical music, despite popularised presentation of its findings in
books, programme notes and broadcasts. The difficulty is not just one of vocabulary.
Most people have enough idea of what melody, harmony, repetition and variation are to
be able to follow a reasonably analytical discussion of music with which they are
familiar. The problem is rather that such a discussion has no obvious correlative in the
way they hear the music as they listen. People who are not musically trained simply
don’t listen to form defined by thematic material and harmonic progression. They listen
to each moment as it happens and respond to it through feeling, not through conscious
analysis. Cook may well be right to suggest that musicologists do this too, while at the
same time following those more technical processes that they are trained to hear, even
though it is only the latter that they use in order to explain what they feel. An interesting
study by Watt and Ash proposes, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘when
music is perceived, it is assigned attributions that would normally be assigned to a
person.’ 5 My suggestion here is that for musicologists this person appears to be
someone rather like themselves, who engages in a complex internal debate, presenting
contrasting hypotheses (represented by themes) in intellectual (harmonic) contexts and
working out the ideas they suggest. For everyone else the person represented seems
more like an actor, responding emotionally to situations that develop around him,
situations that may be calming or enlivening, beautiful, disturbing, frightening, or
thrilling. It’s not hard to see that the experiences of this listener depend to a very
considerable extent on the way performers shape the musical structure notated in the
score. 6 What may be less immediately obvious is that the musicological listener
receives a great deal of information by the same route.

¶13 Another challenge for musicology, then, and one that needs to be faced alongside
finding ways of studying music as sound and in performance, is to reintegrate into its
view of what music is, and of what musicology’s business embraces, the evident fact
that music works with our emotions. At one time this was taken for granted. In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries musical ‘affects’ were a leading topic for
intellectual discussion of music. But as we’ve seen, during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries the study of historical and musico-linguistic facts came to be valued much
more highly. Indeed, it became a matter of principle to keep emotional response to the
material out of musicological work. 7 More recently the situation has entirely changed.
At the end of the last century, ‘new musicology’ made a point of validating subjective
response, bringing in its wake benefits for all of us. While, until now, new musicology
has not paid very much attention to the idea that performance, rather than simply the
mind’s response to the score, might be seen as the crucial trigger for subjective
response, 8 what it has achieved in talking about scores makes it far easier now to see
how studying music as a mechanism generating directed emotional response might be
professionally achievable.

¶14 At the same time, musicology has begun to notice what’s been going on in science
for the past three-quarters of a century and increasingly since the 1980s. With the
development of experimental psychology and neurology it has become increasingly
evident that the brain responds to sounds in predictable ways. Subjectivity only seems
riotous; many of our responses to music are shared, and those that aren’t are still the
result of coherent and potentially understandable processes. There are good reasons,
then, why a particular note in a phrase is stretched, and they are not just music-
analytical; 9 there are good reasons why when he sings that note Pavarotti sounds
anguished, and they are not just theatrical. Behind these layers of reasoning are
physiological processes that determine not just what performers do but also how we feel
about it. And the full meaning of those moments, which musicology exists to explain,
depends on a great many factors that are currently the business of other disciplines.
Thinking about what the performance of music does to us, therefore, has the potential—
indeed, it makes it necessary—first to open up musicology and ultimately to integrate it
with scientific disciplines, because it’s here, and not in history, that the aims of science
and musicology meet. We all want to know what makes music meaningful.

¶15 Of course, this is to look ahead rather a long way. But enough has been done
already in affective science and the psychology of music perception to give us some
pointers towards the processes by which music engages the emotions when we perform
and listen to it. 10 Much of this work has powerful explanatory value for musicians, and
we shall have to take account of it below. At the same time, what musicians do has itself
much to teach us about how the brain processes sound. Musicians in fact have more to
offer than many realise. Performances provide the data. So there is a great deal more at
stake in this new field than simply studying performance as a branch of current
musicology; just how much will, I believe, gradually become apparent over the coming
decades. Here we shall do no more than touch on a few of the possibilities. But it is
certainly one of the aims of this book, while also offering practical approaches to
studying details of performance from recordings, approaches with historical, analytical
and performance-orientated applications, to suggest areas in which we might now start
to look for answers to much wider questions.

1.2. Musicology and recordings

¶16 I hope that what I’ve said so far helps to explain why I think there’s a case for
studying music as performance and from performances. In particular, we can hope to
discover things about how music works in sound and about what performers do to make
it work. What I’m aiming to do in this book, therefore, is to take a step towards a
musicology that studies how music works in us through performance.

¶17 How might we do this? We’ll need a way of studying sounds, and what performers
do to make them, and we’ll need to start, at least, to think about how we perceive them.
As I’ve suggested in talking about musicology and science, it’s immediately clear that
even a limited programme of work, focussing on what performers do, is going to
involve bringing together several areas normally kept separate, including performing as
an activity, acoustics, sound communication, perception and cognition, the emotions.
But before we can look at any of those things we’re going to have to have some
performances to study. And that means looking rather closely at recordings.

¶18 There were a few academic studies of recorded performances before modern times.
Louis P. Lochner quotes perhaps the first analysis of a performer’s style from
recordings, made in 1916 by Eugene Riviere Redervill who examined Fritz Kreisler’s
vibrato. 11 Several studies by Carl Seashore’s research group at the University of Iowa in
the 1920s took records as their sources of data, partly on the grounds that it enabled
others to repeat their experiments exactly. 12 But musical academia has on the whole, at
any rate until recently, taken a fairly dim view of recordings. 13 Robert Philip tells how,
when he ‘wrote to the professor of music at Oxford, Sir Jack Westrup, to ask whether I
might be able to do [research on recorded performance] at Oxford, he replied, “I feel
bound to tell you that I could not recommend this topic to the Faculty as appropriate for
research.”’ 14 Partly, this is because performance has traditionally, among musicologists,
been looked down upon. Musicologists, as I have suggested, were thought to
understand, performers merely to do. And that snobbery is still very obvious in the
relative importance in the academic mind of learning about music, of playing it and of
listening to it on disc. In universities playing is often a bonus, a way of getting good
marks for an extra skill if you have it. Listening to recordings is considered to be a kind
of shortcut to study, saving students the bother of reading scores. Understanding scores
and knowing some history—and the self-delusions involved in that phrase would make
another book—is what really gets you the credit. It was surprisingly recently that British
university music departments started to make a serious effort to use recordings. Even
when I started as a lecturer, in the mid-1980s, most staff still made little use of recorded
examples in their lectures but read orchestral scores at the piano in order to illustrate a
point. It’s a hugely impressive skill, of course, and a musical one. But what mattered
was to illustrate a point about the musical argument, the argument in the score, which
was thus seen as a record of a kind of intellectual process in which notes conversed or
argued with one another until the composer managed to get them all to agree at the end.
This had nothing to do with any particular manner of performance; that was simply a
matter of fashion, entirely separable from the essential nature of the music. Music
existed in its purest and most ideal form on an abstract plane, and it was there that one
must strive to encounter it, not in the unreliable and emotionally charged domain of any
particular performer’s take on the piece. Consequently, one bought lots of scores for the
library but many fewer recordings. And the increasing importance of record collections
was seen as a thoroughly undesirable consequence of incoming students’ increasing
inability to read scores. One bought recordings because the poor dears weren’t
competent to read music any more.

¶19 I don’t think anyone could honestly maintain that music students are as ready to
read music from scores as they once were. But to argue that their understanding of
music was richer when they worked only from scores one has to have what now looks
like a rather narrow view of what ‘music’ is. For anyone who believes, as I’ve begun to
argue above, that music’s meaning depends on far more than just that argument between
the notes, it seems quite obvious that the visceral impact of sound, and the variation
between performances of scores, need to be among the factors available for study when
we work on a piece. How our bodies respond to music, and how differently they
respond to different performances, are matters of fundamental importance if we want to
understand what music is.

¶20 The main danger of using recordings is that we may use too few of them, getting
used to just one view of a piece and losing sight of music’s essential ‘unfixedness’. This
is a subject we’ll come back to later on. For now it’s enough that we begin to entertain
the thought that the impossibility of pinning down the identity and full meaning of a
piece of music in one ideal performance might be not a problem but rather a defining
feature of music, one of the main sources of its power. 15

¶21 There is, of course, a contradiction between celebrating the unfixedness of music
and arguing for the value of recordings, which fix a performance in such an unnatural
way. But the contradiction is one that we must simply accept as a necessary
compromise in the interests of having something to study. The problem can be
alleviated by taking a lot of recordings of the same piece: although each is fixed, the
variability between them gives a good sense of the apparently endless variety of
approaches that can be taken to turning scores into sound. If we take enough samples, as
it were, we can come close to a sense of the openness of music to performance—
performance in the sense of something made without full knowledge of how it will be
made until it happens. Ideally one would study this process in real time. There is
valuable work to be done gathering responses to music as it happens. Indeed it’s
probably the most valuable work that can be done with music, and in time people will
get a lot better at it. But it’s at an early stage, and at the moment there is probably more
to be learned from seeing recordings as performances to which we can return, and from
studying details of them closely. It’s also worth bearing in mind that, for reasons that
are not yet well understood but probably have to do with pre-conscious triggering of
responses to sound stimuli, 16 and thus significant construction of musical meaning in
real time or at most in short-term memory, we tend to hear repeated performances on
record to some extent as if for the first time: we don’t necessarily (although eventually
we may) get bored or find ourselves unsurprised or unmoved by hearing the same
details again and again. 17 There will be more to say about the relationship between
recordings and performances below.

1.2.1. Expertise beyond musicology

¶22 Academics, in fact, are coming very late to the study of recorded performance
which, as we can see, has been going on outside academia for the better part of a
century; and we have an awful lot of catching up to do. Supreme in their hold on facts
are the specialist collectors, who may be interested primarily in one kind of repertoire,
even in just one performer, or in the output of a single record label, but who accumulate
in that field unrivalled knowledge from which academia has much to learn. 18 There is a
great deal of listening and talking to be done with experts who have far more experience
of working with recordings than any of us. Most are now middle-aged or older, and
much of their knowledge is undocumented. I mention this because it should be a priority
for academics in this field to seek out collectors, discographers, and enthusiasts
wherever they can find them, to learn as much as possible, and ideally to offer
university space for their collections, whether documentary or on disc. Many lifetimes’
work will disappear into skips over the next decade or so unless we do something now.

¶23 What sorts of knowledge will be lost? Knowledge about how records were made,
for a start: much of this is lost already; it is now very difficult to answer quite obvious
questions about the processes used by different companies and engineers in the making
of 78rpm discs and cylinders; questions whose answers would make a significant
difference to the way we understand what we hear when we play them. 19 Almost all the
really detailed information about the recording of dynamics and tempo on piano rolls
has gone. 20 Partly this is because much was kept secret for commercial purposes. But a
huge amount could have been preserved if only anyone had thought it worthwhile.

¶24 Equally, a great deal has been recovered by enthusiasts in modern times, above all,
discographies—lists of recordings made, of what is on them, by whom and where and
when they were made, where (if anywhere) they were published. If you’ve not yet tried
to assemble this kind of information you won’t realise just how difficult it is. 21 There is
no universal discography comparable to bibliographies such as RISM, RILM, or The
Music Index. Most published discographies are woefully inadequate for our purposes:
even modern discographies habitually don’t bother with an index of titles, or if they do
then they don’t bother with an index of artists. Modern discographies are much better
about dates of recording, issue and deletion, but older publications (and some of the
largest discographies are fifty or more years old) tend not to offer them. The most
reliable way to find out what was recorded—and even this, supposing one had time for
it, would not be very reliable—would be to read through every annual catalogue
produced by every record label over the past 100 years. 22 These are some of the reasons
why the work of enthusiasts is so valuable, and why it’s so important to preserve it. The
alternative is for a generation of academics to do it all over again. And to be brutally
frank, it is not the sort of work that academics do any more: we are all too busy having
good ideas. There are not many universities, now, where you could get a PhD for a
discography, though few things in this field could be more valuable.

1.2.2. Record reviewing

¶25 It is easy, too, to underestimate the significance of eighty years of record reviewing.
The first specialist journal of the gramophone, 23 the Phonographische Zeitschrift, began
publication as early as 1900, and was concerned with the applications of recording:
what could it be used for and how? 24 It started to review recordings in 1905/06. Record
reviews appeared regularly in newspapers in the UK much later, in the early 1920s, but
at a significant moment. As an article in The Times reported on 22 July 1921,

A member of a large gramophone manufacturing firm said yesterday that the so-called
‘popular’ records were not nearly so popular as they used to be. Far better business was
being done with records of good pieces of music and of good songs by good singers,
although the latter were more expensive than the ‘popular’ records. Records of comic
songs and ragtime music combined quantity with cheapness; but what the gramophone
user required at the moment was quality. He preferred fewer records, so long as those
few were good.

The change in taste had been unexpectedly rapid. During the war the ‘popular’ record
was ‘all the rage’, but after the war came industrial depression and now not many
records were being bought for amusement pure and simple. People simply could not
afford to do so, and the result was that the buying of records of any kind was now
largely confined to the so-called ‘cultured’ classes. More of those were buying records
than ever before, and they had created such a demand that the supply of good records
had been steadily growing.

My informant added that Wagner, Stravinsky, and the Russian composers seemed to be
most in favour at present, and good vocal records had a steady sale. 25

¶26 In this context it’s easier to see why the newspapers of the ‘cultured classes’ chose
this moment to begin regular reviews. Musical Times had already started a monthly
column in January 1921 and the idea quickly spread to newspapers. The Daily
Telegraph, after occasional pieces in 1921, began regular record reviews on 4 March
1922. The Times likewise included occasional items during 1921, but then heralded
regular reviews, which began on 9 March 1922, with an essay on the gramophone and
close listening on 23 February 1922 and a review of Indian language records the
following week. The Scotsman began reviewing records on 18 May the same year. All
this suggests a widespread perception by then that recordings were of substantial artistic
interest, worth reviewing alongside books.

¶27 It’s at this point, therefore, that writing about recorded performance began in
earnest. So when the first periodical devoted to record reviewing, The Gramophone
(later just Gramophone), was founded by the novelist and recent convert to music on
record, Compton Mackenzie, in 1923 it was able to recruit reviewers with some
newspaper experience. 26 The most remarkable of Mackenzie’s catches was Hermann
Klein, born in 1856, a student of Manuel Garcia, the younger, previously music critic of
The Sunday Times and a man able to remember meeting and hearing many of the most
famous composers and performers of the second half of the nineteenth century. 27 It was
Gramophone that set, and for decades (until the appearance of illustrated radio record
reviews after the Second War) maintained, the standard for record reviewing. Its
reviewers were remarkably loyal, 28 and over the decades one can map both their
responses to very gradual changes in performance and changes in their own taste. 29 It’s
worth bearing in mind, also, that reviews represent an enormous depth of knowledge
about musical performance, and although it can rarely be plumbed in the standard rather
brief reviews, the thematic surveys that became increasingly common towards the end
of the last century often have much to teach us about how performances may usefully be
described and compared in words alone.

¶28 Musicologists tend, privately at least, to scorn the comparison of performances that
one finds in the pages of magazines such as Gramophone, Fanfare, and Diapason, or in
radio slots such as the BBC’s ‘Building a Library’ which compares multiple recordings
of one piece and recommends one as the best choice: the flaws in that view of
performance need no underlining, but actually the sorts of details to which reviewers are
attending are those that we shall find ourselves studying, albeit more closely, when we
try to understand what makes a performance interesting. The best reviewers have very
good musical ears, and are able to notice and understand the significance of features in
performances that most listeners only sense rather vaguely, if at all.

1.2.3. Metaphor

¶29 Just as important, and just as interesting from our point of view, is reviewers’
highly developed ability to find analogues in words for the features they hear. We shall
see later that metaphor is very much more than just a regrettable convenience for talking
about music in performance, necessary to fill the huge vocabulary gap between our
emotional responses to music and the technical language available for describing
sounds. Far from being a symptom of perceptual and intellectual failure, metaphor is
fundamental to human perception, an index of the ways our brains connect up stimuli to
generate knowledge and ideas. 30 A skilful record reviewer is telling us things about
performances that are true. If we only understood the mechanism that connects the
metaphor with the sound on the one hand and the sensation on the other we would
understand one of the most important aspects of the way that music works in us.

¶30 What kinds of metaphors are most commonly used? I’ve made a fairly random
selection from roundups of ‘recent reissues’ in two record review magazines that
happen to be within reach as I write, but I find them quite typical. 31

Suggesting manner or deportment

¶31 sluggish, ponderous, tired, tense, vital, rigid, heavy, clumsy, undernourished,
swashbuckling, urgency, sultry, animated, steady, correctness, low-risk, confident,
patient, efficient, unselfconscious, radiance, wit, rapture, spontaneity, sympathetic,
dogged, poetic, profound, tentative, eloquent, affectionate, tenderness, drama, alluring,
matronly, graceful, poise, unostentatious, ardent, impassioned, demonic, unfussy,
seriously, energetic, vibrant, drive, vivid, seedy, dodgy, scruffy, fecund, rugged,
indomitable, burlesque, bluff, chipper, stern, conscientious, imploring, unearthly, brazen
...sight

¶32 bright, dull, monochrome, polished, sparkling, ripe, fresh, burnished, spacious,
dense, sunbursts, beam, sparky, monolithic, grandeur, sinewy

...touch

¶33 soft, hard, cold, warmth, incisive, coarseness, roughness, bite, crisply, chilling,
cold-blooded, stunning, punchy, flexible

...emotion

¶34 exciting, thrillingly, captivating, delightful, elation, touching, goose-bumps, surge

of emotion, hair-raising, chill to the marrow, stirs the blood

...sound

¶35 snap, lyricism, rasping, beery clangour

¶36 It’s striking how few there are from the vocabulary of sound. By far the majority
describe human behaviour, whether expressed through features that can be seen or
features that can be deduced; fewer are derived from the characteristics of things that we
can sense through sight or touch (there are none of smell). A number describe feelings
we have, but not as many as one might expect. By contrast, a great many have
implications for motion. They can be used as descriptions or explanations of particular
manners of human movement; they imply something about the speed or ease or
regularity or predictability with which one thing follows another, or the kind of impact
that is felt when two things move into contact, or when we first catch sight of
something. They take us back, in fact, to some of the most essential observations that
living creatures need to make in order to know what kind of situation they are in and
how they should respond to it. Fundamentally they are all to do with assessing what
might happen next. The extent to which our response to music depends on assessments
as practical and, in an evolutionary sense, as basic as these will become clearer later on
when we look more closely at the way humans respond to sound in life and in music.
And when we come to look at the ways in which our minds make connections across
domains—for example, between sound and manner, or between sound and touch—we’ll
begin to understand the kind of work that these metaphors do and the essential role
metaphor plays in our assigning of meaning to music. For now it is enough to recognise
that the ability to find the right metaphor for a moment in a musical performance is a
very high-level musical and intellectual skill, something that the best record reviewers
have to an admirable extent and from which students of performance on record have
much to learn.

¶37 So musicologists of performance are very far from being the first to study
performance on record. There is a lot of expertise on which we would be foolish not to
draw. In the case of the collectors and enthusiasts, we need to make an effort to make
contact and to persuade them that we can be trusted with the knowledge they have
accumulated, often over a lifetime. In the case of record reviewers their work is there to
study, but guided, hands-on experience would not come amiss. Both these points have
implications for the teaching and development of our field.
1.3. Why now?

¶38 As we’ve seen, it’s taken a very long time for musicology to get around to studying
performances. Why does it seem to make sense now, when for so long it did not? First,
the idea that music exists independently of performance, although a staple of
musicology and the philosophy of music, is beginning to look distinctly shaky. For most
musical cultures in the world (including western popular music) it is nonsensical. For
western classical music it’s conceivable only because of notation. The more we believe
that notation encodes the work, rather than simply providing sketchy performance
instructions using which a performer can make the work, the more inclined we are to
believe that works exist in some abstract yet ideal form independent of any
performance. It is more than anything else the modern availability in CD reissue of 100
years of recorded performances that has upset those beliefs. Now we can hear that
works we thought were fixed (or fixable, given a good enough editor) have actually
changed radically in performance over the past century, it’s much easier to think of
works as open—fields of possibilities, underdetermined by notation, that seem to
change all the time.

¶39 Secondly, there has been the coincidental undermining of the notion of authenticity
which gradually, since the mid-1980s, 32 has killed off the belief that there is an ideal
reading, even if no one is capable of achieving it, in the shape of the composer’s ideal
performance. 33 If I may be autobiographical for a moment, it was listening to recordings
that made me realise, sometime in 1983, that the claims of the early instrument
authenticists were unsustainable. 34 And I can see now much more clearly than I could
then how recorded-sound evidence of performance practice puts a bomb under the
notion that one can reconstruct performance styles using only written materials.

¶40 Thirdly, and like it or not, the relativism theorised by post-modernism, but
operating in practice in so many aspects of contemporary western culture, has made it
seem far more reasonable than it used to seem to accept different instances of the work
as equally valid. Clearly one can take that too far; there has to be discrimination on
grounds of competence, at least, but one has to recognise that much is a matter of taste.
People play in ways that reflect their own understandings of music, and above a certain
(rather high) level of technical ability it is probably not sensible to object solely on the
grounds that one’s own view is different. Performances that vary as much as those we
can now so easily compare are powerfully symbolic of the range of cultures and
orientations that we nowadays (in the West) accept as equally valuable.

¶41 Fourthly, and closely related to this, is what one might call post-historicism, the
notion, which is only just beginning to appear in musical studies, that history isn’t what
it claims to be and cannot be known except from a radically distorted modernist
viewpoint. Recordings have a provocative relationship with both that and with the
traditional view of music history. On the one hand they tell us—allowing for the
shortcomings in the recordings—how it sounded; on the other they tell us that our idea
of what is ideally musical is radically unlike ‘theirs’ and cannot encompass it. As a
result we cannot know what it meant to hear those recordings ‘then’, let alone the
performances behind them. And for that reason early recordings are, in the end, more
fully grist to our mill than they are windows on the past.

¶42 For all these reasons, and no doubt many others, the time to study performances
through recordings has come. For the first time, to a significant body of musicologists it
seems sensible and desirable. 35 What makes it possible, though, has to do less with
changing ideas than with developments in commerce and technology. First is the fact
that after 100 years of music recording, and thanks to its huge commercial success, we
have accumulated enough data to enable us to see how much of musical performance
changes over time. Secondly, we at last have sufficiently flexible, powerful and
affordable technology to enable comparisons of recordings, on both small and large
scales, to be made easily. Digital encoding and personal computing open up fields of
study that would have been impractical, and perhaps impossible before. 36

1.4. What will this book do?

¶43 My aim in this book is to set out some ideas about why music might be worth
studying from performances rather than from scores, about how we might do it, and
about how our view of music will change as a result. I must emphasise that I am writing
as a musicologist, and so I am working within some fairly conventional limitations,
confining myself to western classical music, focussing on canonical nineteenth-century
pieces, and assuming some general knowledge of classical harmony and form. At the
same time, what I want to do is to encourage a new generation of music students,
performers, and music lovers too, to think about this music in a rather different way. I
shall try to persuade you that how the music feels while we are listening to it matters
more than how it was composed. Understanding the way it feels is very much
musicology’s business, and always has been, albeit often at several removes. But there
may be a case now for moving it closer to centre stage. With so much data easily to
hand, now seems the time to develop some techniques for making use of it. By
proposing some, and by looking at the issues that surround them, I’ll try to suggest
some of the directions musicology might take in order to encompass music as
performance within its borders.

¶44 I think we have room for this now. We probably know most of what we shall ever
know about music history, at least up to, say, the middle of the last century (there is still
a lot to be established about more recent events). The study of scores has produced
wonderful insights into the relationships that form between notes when composers set
them down on paper. But the study of what performers do, and of what that means to
listeners, has barely begun within musicology. In the meantime, though, a lot has been
happening that is relevant in science, especially within psychology and neuroscience.
And it seems very clear that science is best-equipped to answer many of the questions
that we might want to ask. But musicians have a contribution to make too, and over the
next few years the extent of that may perhaps become clearer. In what follows I shall be
making many references to studies that are provocative for ideas we might have about
how music works; we shall see that many things that musicians sense are being
confirmed by the findings of science. What I hope to persuade you is that a musicology
of performance that learns from science, and that teaches it as well, could be hugely
worthwhile, and that as time goes on the boundaries between musicology and science, at
any rate in the field of performance studies, may become rather harder to discern.

¶45 The things I don’t do in this book, but might have done, or should have done, are
legion. I don’t deal with ensemble performance, except for a few passing comments on
the relationship of singer and accompanist in Lieder. There are some good reasons for
this: I want to study details and to understand who is responsible for them and why, and
that is much harder to do when there are a number of players; I also want to be able to
use spectrum visualisations, and for them to be useful at all it has to be possible to say
which elements map each performer and each note. In due course better techniques will
be developed for studying string quartet or orchestral playing, for example, but we’ll
make more progress now with simpler materials.

¶46 A much more serious omission is any detailed discussion of the relationship
between technique and sound. I talk a lot about the sounds performers make, but hardly
at all about what they do with hands and voices to make those sounds. Yet technique is
perhaps the most important element in the whole process, since it makes everything else
possible. I have a good reason for not dealing with it and also a poor excuse. The reason
is that it would have made the book twice as long and several times as complicated; the
excuse is simply that I am competent in only one of the instruments on which I focus
(the piano), and while I have rather more technical skill in others of the same family I
don’t regard them as adequately transferable (and I’m not sure harpsichord playing
offers the best focus for this particular book). Nevertheless, technique is an essential
part of the subject. Its interaction with sound is hugely complex, but, as Rebecca Plack
has shown in a fine study of early recorded singing, 37 when one is able to examine that
interaction authoritatively one’s comments on performances can be much more detailed.
Being able to distinguish between technical convenience (or even necessity) and
expressive intention, often to show their mutual dependence, greatly enriches one’s
understanding. Of course there is a danger that having a very firm view of what makes
effective expression, derived from the way one does it oneself, can blind one to the
virtues of other kinds of musicianship. But the advantages of being able to say what a
musician is doing with their fingers or their breath far outweigh that in most cases.

¶47 The book is entirely concerned with moment-to-moment details. It doesn’t cover
the statistical investigation of large data sets which, as we have seen from recent work
by Cook and Sapp on Chopin mazurkas, 38 and by Spiro, Gold and Rink using the same
data, 39 can offer a powerful approach to understanding style. Again, this is partly
because I lack the statistical skills, partly because we all worked within a larger research
project— CHARM —and the variety of approaches was intentional, but partly too
because for me it’s those moments that make music endlessly fascinating, exciting and
moving. To understand how music feels that way, and why, is what drives me as a
musicologist.

¶48 What will this book do for you? If you’re someone who loves music, perhaps
performs for fun, and reads about it in order to learn more, you may feel that so much of
the book is obvious that you can’t believe musicology needs a special case to be made
for studying it. Of course performances are the music, of course the things that
performers do from moment to moment have a profound impact on what the music
means to us, of course we need to pay attention to the musical surface and not just to
deep structure or to historical and cultural context. But you’ll also understand, I hope,
why this is so difficult for musicologists. If you’re a performer, I very much hope that
the variety of performance styles we’ll examine may open your ears to a range of
possibilities far wider than is currently practised, though you’ll also recognise that to
reproduce many of them would be commercially suicidal. But conceptual blending is, as
we shall see, one of the things humans are quite good at, and I hope it may be difficult
to come away from this book without a sense that, if not anything goes, at any rate a lot
more can go today than one might think. If you’re a university music student, especially
one who is thinking about a career there, I hope I might be able to persuade you that
musicology is full of potential for some thinking about music that has more in common
with listening to it and performing it. For the closer those three activities are, the closer
we are to understanding what music is.

• <Back to top>
• <Next section>

Footnotes

1.
For the emerging counterview see Joel Lester, ‘Performance and analysis:
interaction and interpretation’, in ed. John Rink, The Practice of Performance:
studies in musical interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 197-216,
esp. 198; Peter Johnson, ‘Performance and the listening experience: Bach’s
“Erbarme Dich”’, in Nicholas Cook, Peter Johnson & Hans Zender, Theory into
Practice: composition, performance and the listening experience (Leuven
University Press, 1999), 55-101, esp. 56-7; Roy Howat, ‘Debussy’s piano music:
sources and performance’ in ed. Richard Langham Smith, Debussy Studies
(Cambridge, 1997), 78-107. Back to context...
2.
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an essay in the
philosophy of music (Oxford University Press, 1992). Back to context...
3.
Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford University Press,
1990), 3. Back to context...
4.
Thomas Clifton, Music as heard: a study in applied phenomenology (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 71. Back to context...
5.
Roger J. Watt & Roisín L. Ash, ‘A psychological investigation of meaning in
music’, Musicae Scientiae 2 (1998) 33-53, at 49. There is much discussion of
metaphorical mapping between musical and person in Charles O. Nussbaum,
The Musical Representation: meaning, ontology, and emotion (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), esp. chapter 3. Back to context...
6.
For a thought-provoking treatment of musical meaning in listening see Eric
Clarke, Ways of Listening: an ecological approach to the perception of musical
meaning (Oxford University Press, 2005). On musicology’s ignorance of the
listener’s perspective see esp. p. 122-4. Back to context...
7.
Aaron Ridley is particularly good on the consequences of this attitude in the
philosophy of music. The Philosophy of Music: theme and variations
(Edinburgh University Press, 2004), esp. 7-15. Back to context...
8.
This remains true even of the very recent book by Lawrence Kramer, whose
wonderfully evocative descriptions of the effects of compositions seem
oblivious to (or take too much for granted) the fact that they refer not to the
work per se but to the effects of a performance of it (Kramer (2007), 23-4). Back
to context...
9.
Ian Cross, ‘Music analysis and music perception’, Music Analysis 17 (1998) 3-
20. Back to context...
10.
A very fine overview is John Sloboda and Patrik Juslin, ‘Psychological
perspectives on music and emotion’, in ed. Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda,
Music and Emotion: theory and research (Oxford University Press, 2001) 71-
104. Another is Alf Gabrielsson and Patrik N Juslin, ‘Emotional expression in
music’ in ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer & H. Hill Goldsmith,
Handbook of Affective Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2003), 503-34. Back
to context...
11.
Louis P. Lochner, Fritz Kreisler (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 272-3. Back to
context...
12.
Ed. Carl E. Seashore, The Vibrato, Studies in the Psychology of Music 1 (Iowa
City: University of Iowa, 1932), see esp. p. 111; Carl E. Seashore, Psychology of
the Vibrato in Voice and Instrument, Studies in the Psychology of Music 3
(Iowa City: The University Press, 1936); ed. Carl E. Seashore, Objective
Analysis of Musical Performance, Studies in the Psychology of Music 4 (Iowa
City: The University Press, 1936). For an early study of Chopin playing on
record see Józef Kański, ‘Über die Aufführungsstile der Werke Chopins: einige
allgemeine Probleme der Aufführung auf Grund von Schallplattenaufnahmen’,
in Zofia Lissa (ed.), The Book of the First International Musicological Congress
devoted to the Works of Chopin: Warszawa 16th–22nd February 1960 (Warsaw:
PWN Polish Scientific Publishers, 1963), 444-54. Back to context...
13.
During the first half of the twentieth century this was true of the musical
profession as well. See chapter 4 of Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded
Music: listening to musical history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000),
199-256. Back to context...
14.
Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 1. Back to context...
15.
For a philosophical justification see Michael Krausz, ‘Rightness and reasons in
musical interpretation’, in ed. Michael Krausz, The Interpretation of Music:
philosophical essays (Oxford, 1993), 75-87. Back to context...
16.
Sloboda and Juslin (2001), 92-3. Back to context...
17.
For some discussion of this see Stephen Davies, Musical Works and
Performances: a philosophical exploration (Oxford University Press, 2001),
305; and, with some theoretical grounding in studies of perception, Nussbaum
(2007) esp. 216-17. Back to context...
18.
See outstandingly the contents of ed. Larry Lustig, The Record Collector: a
quarterly journal of recorded vocal art, with meticulously researched articles
and discographies. Also Classic Record Collector (previously International
Classical Record Collector), edited until recently by Tully Potter. Back to
 context...
19.
For fascinating work reconstructing early recording processes, however, see
especially the publications of George Brock-Nannestad, and Roger Beardsley’s
online Guide to 78s . Back to context...
20.
For examples of the furthest we can now get see the contents of The Pianola
Journal . Back to context...
21.
For a valuable introduction to discography see Simon Trezise, ‘The recorded
document: interpretation and discography’, in ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke,
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink, The Cambridge Companion to
Recorded Music (Cambridge University Press, 2009). For useful advice on
presenting discographies see the Association of Recorded Sound Collections
guidelines. Back to context...
22.
There are fine collections on the open shelves in the British Library (London), in
the Humanities 2 reading area. For the Gramophone Co. (HMV, later EMI) there
is a full run at The EMI Archive, accessible by appointment. The King's Sound
Archive's collection is listed at
http://charm.kcl.ac.uk/discography/disco_catalogues.html. Substantial runs are
available in most sound archives, though they are not always visible in online
catalogues. Back to context...
23.
I exclude trade publications, such as The Phonogram (1891). Back to context...
24.
The first two issues are discussed in Daniel Barolsky, ‘Romantic Piano
Performance as Creation’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2005, 42. I
am extremely grateful to Barolsky for checking issues for record reviews. He
finds that ‘from July 5, 1906 (Jahrg. 6, 27 [possibly before, as issues from 1905
and early 1906 were not available]), there is a regular section called
“Phonokritik” written by Max Chop which reviews recent releases. It’s
organized by record company (i.e. Odeon, Polyphon, Beka, Favorite, etc.) and
reviews everything from the sound quality to the composition and performance.’
(Personal communication.) Back to context...
25.
A Correspondent, ‘The Gramophone Habit: “Popular” Records Now
Unpopular’, The Times, no. 42779, 22 July 1921, p.7 col. F. I am extremely
grateful to Nick Morgan for drawing this and other articles to my attention and
for his feedback on an earlier draft of this section. Back to context...
26.
On the history of Gramophone see Anthony Pollard’s fascinating Gramophone:
the first 75 years (Harrow: Gramophone Publications, 1998). For Gramophone
reviewing as a cultural phenomenon see Colin Symes, Setting the Record
Straight: a material history of classical recording (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2004), esp. chapters 7 & 8, pp. 182-211. Back to context...
27.
A fascinating collection of Klein’s reviews is to be found in William R Moran,
Herman Klein and the Gramophone, being a series of essays on the Bel canto
(1923), the Gramophone and the Singer (1924-1934), and reviews of new
 classical vocal recordings (1925-1934), and other writings from the
Gramophone (Portland, Or.: Amadeus, 1990). Back to context...
28.
Over the (so far) 85 years of Gramophone there have been, for example, only
three principal reviewers of song, Hermann Klein, Alec Robertson (from 1934)
and Alan Blyth (1972-2007). Back to context...
29.
Barolsky (2005) offers a valuable survey of the early years of Gramophone (40-
63) and briefly discusses (63-4) the German equivalent, Fono Forum, which
began in 1956. The French Diapason was founded in 1955, and the American
Fanfare in 1977. Record reviews appeared in numerous specialist music and hi-
fi magazines also, either side of the mid-century. The best way to access record
reviews is still Kurtz Myers, Record ratings; the Music Library Association's
index of record reviews (New York: Crown, 1956), and Index to Record Reviews
(Boston: Hall, 1978, 1983 & 1989), continued in Mark Palkovic & Paul
Cauthen, Index to Record Reviews 1987-1997 (New York: Hall, 1998). An
admirably full set of the relevant magazines is to be found on the open shelves in
the British Library (Humanities 2). Back to context...
30.
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago
Press, 1980, rev. ed. 2003); Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: language,
culture, and body in human feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Back to
context...
31.
Andrew Aschenbach in Gramophone 82 (August 2004) 36-8; Nigel Simeone in
International Record Review 5/2 (July/August 2004) 24-5, plus a few that were
in my preparatory notes for this section. For a much more colourful example,
also by Achenbach, try ‘Disquiet below the surface’ (on Vaughan Williams’
Pastoral Symphony), Gramophone July 2002, 36-40. Back to context...
32.
The classic study here is Richard Taruskin, ‘The pastness of the present and the
presence of the past’, originally published in ed. Nicholas Kenyon, Authenticity
and Early Music (Oxford University Press, 1988) 137-210, but usefully
reprinted with other work on this theme in Taruskin, Text and Act: essays on
music and performance (Oxford University Press, 1995), 90-154. See also John
Butt, Playing with History: the historical approach to musical performance
(Cambridge University Press, 2002). For an attempt to restore the historical
status of historically informed performance see Peter Walls, History,
Imagination and the Performance of Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003). Back
to context...
33.
Still very much alive even in Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical
Reproduction: notes, a draft and two schemata (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Back
to context...
34.
In preparing a lecture in the Music Faculty at the invitation of Peter Le Huray,
written up as ‘The limits of authenticity’, Early Music xii (1984) 13-16. Back to
context...
35.
To assist musicology to work with performance on record was the purpose of the
 AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music: see
www.charm.kcl.ac.uk for details of its work. Back to context...
36.
The publication of Robert Cogan’s New Images of Musical Sound in 1984
alerted me to the possibility of studying performances in real detail using
spectrograms, and together with my colleague Phil Gaffney at Churchill
College, Cambridge, I looked into the practicality of a PC-based spectrographic
analysis system, using as the display a television on its side (refreshing left-to-
right as the music moved across the screen). We quickly abandoned the idea.
Cogan had been using specialist equipment at IBM, and it was clear that at that
time nothing less would do. The continuing development of the personal
computer in the interim, of course, has transformed the situation, and what was
then a wild idea is now a routine exercise for audio engineering students.
Cogan’s work was pioneering, but although he is often assumed to have been the
first to work on recordings using spectrograms, in fact a previous form of the
technique was developed by Metfessel as early as 1926 and was used with
precision and sophistication by the Iowa psychology lab. See Milton Metfessel,
‘The vibrato in artistic voices’, in ed. Seashore (1932), 14-117 at 15 & 379. The
equipment available to Seashore’s team at the height of its productivity is
outlined in Harold Seashore, ‘An objective analysis of artistic singing’, in ed.
Seashore (1936), 12-171 at 14-6. Back to context...
37.
Rebecca Plack, ‘The Substance of Style: How singing creates sound in Lieder
recordings, 1902-1939’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2008 Back to
context...
38.
Nicholas Cook, ‘Performance analysis and Chopin’s mazurkas’, Musicae
Scientiae 11 (2007), 183-207 Back to context...
39.
Neta Spiro, Nicolas Gold and John Rink, ‘Plus ça change? In how many
different ways can Chopin’s mazurka Op. 24 no. 2 be performed and why?’
CHARM Newsletter 2008 (pdf file), 4-9 Back to context...

Document Contents

• 1. Introduction
o 1.1. Musicology and performances
o 1.2. Musicology and recordings
1.2.1. Expertise beyond musicology
1.2.2. Record reviewing
1.2.3. Metaphor
o 1.3. Why now?
o 1.4. What will this book do?

©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, England, United Kingdom.
Tel +44 (0)20 7836 5454
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Document Contents

• 2. Understanding the sources: Musical works and musical performances

o 2.1. Musical works
o 2.2. Musical performances

2. Understanding the sources: Musical works and

musical performances
2.1. Musical works

¶1 There are a number of issues we have to think about, and there’s quite a lot we need
to know, before we can talk sensibly about music in recordings. First we need to take a
view on the relationship between music and performance, and then between
performance and recorded performance. Among other things, we need to know how
recordings were made—by no means a small topic, since techniques changed
throughout the twentieth century and continue to do so. Then we shall be in a better
position to determine the extent to which recordings can safely be used as sources in
projects that seek to study performance.

¶2 What we mean by ‘music’ is going to be crucial to our view of recordings and their
relation to performance and so I have to begin by looking at this more fundamental
question. Let’s agree that we’re going to talk about western classical music. We don’t
have to, but since most of this book is about that it seems unnecessary for these
purposes to decide what is music for all places and times. Nor do I intend to get bogged
down arguing the difference between music and other sound. Since John Cage it has
become impossible to be categorical about the distinction: so much depends on how one
chooses to think about it. Even so, deciding what, or perhaps better, where music is—in
the notation, or in performance, or in our minds—is not easy.

¶3 Naturally, we all feel that we know what music is; that is to say, we can think about
music, we can imagine it, and we know it when we hear it; but can we explain what it is
to anyone else? It’s surprisingly difficult to do: music theorists, philosophers and
lexicographers have been trying for at least 2000 years. For a while, after about 1800,
the problem became simpler, at least for those who studied what we now call classical
music. For it was around then that people began to think of music not just as something
one did but also as a collection of compositions that had the potential to live indefinitely
as musical ‘works’ that, if they were good, would be studied, read, played and admired
long into the future, even though their composers and original social contexts might be
long since gone. Music, therefore, became something one could imagine as a body of
work, one that was growing but one whose existing members had a stable form: one
could go and find them, get them off the shelf, read them, think and write about them.
Musical scores, which had previously been seen as simply a partial record of some
aspects of composition, a convenient aid to music-making, became the image of music
itself. 1

¶4 It is easy to see how much this benefited composers. As their stock rose they became
more like painters, sculptors and architects, makers of objects that would live
indefinitely. Once one starts to think of a work of music as an object it naturally begins
to need a more fixed form, and composers began to specify in notation details that had
previously been left to performers to determine. The score gradually became
authoritative, and ‘the music’ was to be found within it. Performances, as a
consequence, were not so much the music any more, but rather were attempts to do the
music justice: a performance could never be as good as the piece being performed. 2 The
performer did his best, but the work could never be as fully realised in sound as it had
been in the composer’s imagination or (and this too was often said) as it could be in the
imagination of a musically intelligent reader. 3

¶5 What saved performers from servitude was that, for all but the most expert readers,
they remained absolutely necessary, and in fact the more composers demanded of them
the more impressive they became. This in itself should have been enough, one might
now think, for a reassessment of the relative importance of composer and performer; but
of course it was also true that much of the credit for what performers achieved returned
to the composer. Consequently, by the end of the nineteenth century, a new equilibrium
was more or less achieved. Composers were the real geniuses, but performers could be
spectacularly impressive showmen, using composers’ scores for displays of virtuosity
and imagination that thrilled audiences every bit as much as the compositions they
played. 4 It was an uneasy alliance, and one from which performers, in time, might still
have broken away. But at this point something quite unexpected happened. In 1877,
Thomas Edison showed that it was possible to reproduce sound.

¶6 It is difficult for us today to imagine how extraordinary that was: and yet, if one
measures its significance by its novelty—the extent to which it introduced an ability
inconceivable before—it seems one of the most remarkable things that has ever
happened. A phenomenon that had previously been the most ephemeral of all suddenly
became repeatable, indeed fixed: from now on, one could listen to the same sounds
again and again. How this would affect the power relations between composers and
performers would have been hard to predict, and in fact it took a long time for a trend to
become obvious. In some respects performers benefited greatly. The stars became far
better known and far better off. A page from the Victor royalty accounts for Caruso
from June 1906 to June 1909 shows Caruso earning £9,922 0s 4d on sales of 67,785
discs, 5 and there can be little doubt that what he was singing was much less important to
buyers than the fact that it was he who was singing it. Moreover, performers became in
some respects very much more skilled. Recording discouraged mistakes; increased
accuracy allowed composers to write more complex music; and so on. Recording is not
the only factor in this, but any conservatoire teacher with a long memory will tell you
today that standards among young musicians struggling to gain a foothold in the
profession have never been so high. Much of this is a long-term result of the perfection
increasingly demanded by the ever-greater accuracy of sound reproduction.
¶7 The downside to this must already be obvious. If accuracy comes first, spontaneity
and originality are pushed into second place. As has been repeatedly claimed, recording
seems to have encouraged conformity and predictability. 6 But is this really true?
Hearing what is characteristic of the performance style of one’s own time is far more
difficult than picking out the defining features of past styles, styles no longer
inextricably bound up with our own way of seeing the world. One of the things that (I
predict) is going to become increasingly obvious as time goes by—and also as we get
better at studying performances—is that there is just as much variety of approach now
as ever there was. What I think has happened, in addition to the unavoidable difficulty
I’ve just mentioned of standing back from the performance style around one, is that
editing, in removing the slips made by musicians (just as film has removed the verbal
and action slips that characterise real life) has removed a ‘vital’ aspect of human
musical performance. 7 And musicians, in learning to play as more nearly perfectly as
recordings, have done the same. It’s not that performance is any less varied now, simply
that it is more unblemished. It’s hard to argue with the complaint that national styles of
performing have all but disappeared (though the benefits of nationalism in any form
ought to be continually open to question). But in another important respect the rather
gloomy view of current commentators has merit. Individuality, still prized in theory, has
been discouraged in practice, partly for the reasons I’ve just mentioned, but also—and
less defensibly—because for so many musicologists creativity is not the performer’s
job: only the composer is considered to be a creator of music. The most accurate
possible performance of the score is all that is required. None of this has been helped by
developments in the academy. At just the same time that performance was becoming
stricter, in the universities musicology was insisting that strict methodology could solve
music-historical puzzles. By examining every bit of evidence from the past, and by
thinking clearly about it, musicologists would be able to say what a composer had
originally intended: they could specify the original notes he had written down, removing
corruptions allowed to aggregate through carelessness or ill-advised interpretation; and
through the new discipline of analysis they could reveal a work’s fundamental structure.
It became ever clearer that the performer’s ‘duty’ was to reproduce the composer’s text
and point up the music’s underlying form. 8

¶8 So performers were disciplined not only by recording but also by academia, and both
played an ever-more important part in their training. It’s easy to see how, when its time
came, the historically informed performance movement developed such a stranglehold
on so much music-making. Here were historical facts to be respected, instruments that
tended to produce cleaner sounds than before (a balance of harmonics favouring upper
partials), a modern environment in which precision was valued higher than ever. What
could result if not a sense that accuracy, faithfulness to the past, servitude of performer
to composer, were not just desirable but morally right? Living under an ideology like
this, music could not possibly be thought to reside anywhere but in the composer’s
score.

¶9 Recording, therefore, has tended to reinforce rather than to undermine the notion that
music exists in works that exist in scores that represent composers’ wishes that are to be
observed. At least, it has reinforced that notion until recently. 9 But what I aim to show
in this book is that to study recordings can lead us to conclusions that are quite the
opposite. Music doesn’t exist in works, works don’t exist in scores, and neither does
music, nor do scores represent composers’ wishes, nor should composers’ wishes
necessarily be observed. 10 Fortunately, perhaps, all these conclusions have been or are
being reached in other, perhaps more theoretically inclined branches of musicology; the
point to be made here is that this is not simply a theoretical issue, but a conclusion that
arises out of the way music has been practised and is perceived. How this is so will
gradually become clear as we proceed.

¶10 Another route to this conclusion comes through philosophy, although it has to be
said that not many philosophers of music have yet reached it. Nevertheless some
account of what has been happening in the philosophy of music will be useful before we
go any further. As will become apparent, most philosophers of music are not first and
foremost musicians, and tend to see music as a philosophical category before they see it
as a sensation or as the output of a set of musical skills. 11 While from philosophy’s
point of view that is as it should be, it remains generally the case (though there are
notable exceptions) that the practicalities of music-making, and the realities of educated
music perception, are not always very well understood. Their counterview, of course, is
that musicians don’t think straight.

The philosophers’ view

¶11 The modern philosophy of musical works and performances, from musicology’s
point of view, begins with Roman Ingarden, whose The Work of Music and the Problem
of its Identity appeared in 1962 (and in English only as recently as 1986). 12 Ingarden’s
approach makes philosophical sense of traditional cultured understandings of the
relationship between composer, performer and listener. For him, a performance ‘is not
in any sense a constitutive element of the work’ any more than pigments constitute an
element of a painting,[53] because the work is not its physical components but rather
the thing that they make, not a physical object—whether paint on canvas or sound in
time—but rather an ‘intentional object’, the piece as made in the composer’s mind at the
point of its creation. The composer’s intentions for the work define its identity.[117]
‘[A]t the moment of its creation all its phases exist simultaneously’; only in
performance are they taken apart and performed sequentially; thus the work does not
fully exist in performance.[70, 65] Nor does it exist fully in score: the composer cannot
specify all the work’s details because notation is not adequate for the task: ‘both the
fixed and the open elements have been conceived by the composer as fully defined and
fixed, but he does not command a musical notation that would do them justice.’[116]
Consequently we cannot know which performance best represents the work as an ideal
aesthetic object: we can’t know enough about the ideal work to know that.[143] ‘The
composer’s artistic achievement is ... the creation of the work as a schema subject to
musical notation ... that displays a variety of potential profiles’ through its
performances.[157]

¶12 Ingarden’s notion of an intentional object is useful because it offers a way of

dealing with the evident but conceptually very difficult facts—difficult because nothing
else is quite like this—that a piece of music is 1) composed by an individual and
appears to exist in some sense thereafter, 2) is something that can be discussed in detail
independently of any performance, and 3) is recognisable and yet at the same time
different whenever it is performed. In a nutshell the problem is that musical works exist
without a fixed or fixable form. What the philosopher of music needs is a rationalisation
for this that makes a work of music as like any other artwork as possible. Ingarden’s
intentional object offers a way of doing this, but at the cost of a view of music that may
not be fully grounded in historical or social reality. It is far from clear that composers
have always, or even often, believed that their works were fully conceived by them,
having a single ideal form, which they would specify fully if only notation were
adequate to the task. There may have been a tendency towards such a belief increasing
during the nineteenth and (in some quarters) the twentieth century, but as I’ve already
suggested that is intimately bound up with a change towards a view of music as text
rather than as practice, and with the particular construction of the notion of a musical
work identified by Lydia Goehr. 13 It is socially contingent, in other words, and not a
safe basis for a philosophy of music. By tying our view of a work to a composer’s
intentions we are putting ourselves in a position in which we can only fail to perform
the work. 14 The composer’s intentions can never be known sufficiently. And while it is
certainly true that many performers pay lip-service to the idea that their aim is to realise
the composer’s intentions, few if any believe that those intentions are to be discerned by
asking or reading about the composer. On the contrary, for almost all performers a sense
of the composer’s intentions emerges from time spent playing the work. What feels
right comes to seem as if it must be what the composer intended; and the more right it
feels the more inclined one is to believe that one has reached the heart of the work. This
is all unproblematic and to be expected; we simply have to accept that there is an
element of well-meant self-delusion in reading from one’s performance back to the
composer’s wishes.

¶13 Just as relevant, in assessing the plausibility of a philosophy of music grounded in

intentionality, is a realistic assessment of the audience’s experience. Who among an
audience of listeners knows or cares about the composer’s wishes? Historians may well
know something, and care a lot; but in being outraged by performances that ignore their
knowledge and beliefs they are responding not to inadequacies in the musical
experience, but rather to the performer’s making personal rather than historical
judgements about what to play. Their outrage comes from a moral judgement about the
performance, not a musical one. Most listeners in a typical audience, however, bring
few moral criteria to bear on what they hear; for most, what matters is how the sound of
the music makes them feel. And to that extent they are behaving much more like
performers than like historians. Just as the performer places each note in relation to the
last so that it feels right, so most listeners evaluate their experience of the performance
according to the rightness of the sequence of sounds they have heard. Thus—returning
to philosophies of music based on notions of intention—by shifting the identity of the
work away from performance towards the composer’s imagination we place it
somewhere where we can never find it, and somewhere where it has no power to
account for the experience of music in reality.

¶14 Jerrold Levinson also identifies the work inextricably with the composer and the
context in which it was composed, but at the same time accepts performance as essential
to it. Thus a work is a performed sound structure specified by a composer at a given
time. 15 What this means is that a performance that departed from the sound structure
specified by the composer would not produce the same work. 16 Philosophically that
seems unproblematic, but of course it bears only a partial relation to the experience of
musicians. It is perfectly possible to change quite a lot of notes in a score, to play more
than are indicated, or fewer, or other, and still produce a recognisable and persuasive
performance that most listeners will find it sensible to consider as a performance of that
work. They may be wrong from a philosophical point of view; but on the whole it seems
reasonable to accept as reliable the judgement of experienced listeners. One could leave
it at that and simply accept that musicians habitually think things about musical works
that cannot be strictly true. But I want to argue that they are in fact correct, not simply
because they ought to know best, though I think that a significant consideration, but also
because incomplete specification is a normative feature of musical works, and it is by
no means reasonable to draw a firm line between those details that the composer has
chosen to specify and those she has not, or to argue that the first category of details is
fundamentally different in kind from the second.

¶15 Let’s look at a real case. A composer notates three crotchets in a bar. A performer
may play those durations with proportional lengths of 2:5:4, as in Chopin’s Mazurka
Op. 24 no. 4 recorded by Ignacy Friedman in 1930. 17 There is no way of knowing
Chopin’s intentions. If one’s interested in them, one may wish to know that Friedman
danced mazurkas in Poland as a boy, so his views on rhythmic stress may have some
value in terms of the work’s historical context (though Chopin wrote to his family of his
mazurkas that ‘they are not written for dancing’). 18 We can’t know what Chopin
imagined here. All we can say is, first, that Friedman is most definitely not playing
three equal-length notes, or anything like them, and second, that the artistic results are
highly satisfactory. Either the sound structure specified by the composer is not being
performed, or—if it is to include what the composer wanted, regardless of what
notational convention led him to write—we do not know what that sound structure was.
It might have been 5:2:4, or 5:4:2, or anything else that a performer can make work
according to the judgement of listeners. If the work is anything more than its notation,
but other than a particular performance, we cannot know precisely what it is.

¶16 We accept relatively easily the idea that notes may be longer or shorter than
specified. We’re less easy with the thought that the pitches might be different. Yet there
are any number of examples on record of performers changing pitches deliberately—for
instance doubling them at the octave to produce a richer or more brilliant effect, or
filling in a diatonic scale with semitones to make it chromatic, or even making it a
glissando. These examples come from a period (before the Second World War) in which
such changes were entirely normal, and were regarded much as ornamentation was in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For those performers they lie well within the
identity boundaries of the musical work. They may or may not for us, and they might or
might not have for the composer. These things change. Like so many things to do with
music, views of the performer’s role in relation to the score are not fixed. 19 It seems to
follow that statements about the identity of the musical work, if they are to be true
beyond their own historical context, need to be so general as to be barely worth the
bother of making. What performers do with scores is far more interesting and, indeed,
more determinative of what music is.

¶17 It won’t be surprising, then, that I’m not much in sympathy with either Stephen
Davies’s or Peter Kivy’s elegant attempts to make historically informed performance a
necessary ingredient in the identity of the musical work. For them, as for so many
musicologists, the historical informing is to be done by the composer’s intentions. For
Davies, pinning down Levinson’s definition still further, ‘a musical work is a performed
sound structure as made normative in a musico-historical setting’. 20 Consequently,
‘Scores implicate the historical and social contexts in which they are generated, for the
instructions they encode can be understood only by the person aware of the conventions
by which they are to be read.’[159] From which it follows that ‘Because it is essentially
implicated in a work’s performance [in other words, it’s not the work if this doesn’t
happen], authenticity is an ontological requirement, not an interpretive option.’[207, his
italics] Of course there are practical limits to this. Although logically he should, Davies
doesn’t require us to reproduce the composer’s mental performance, or a performance
of his time, since he recognises that that is now impossible; we simply have to do our
best to be authentic. There are, nevertheless, some extraordinary let-out clauses which
hint, beyond his willingness to compromise on grounds of practicality, at a philosophy
driven more by preference than by consistency. We needn’t use boys in performing
Shakespeare, he tells us, because the prohibition of women from the Elizabethan stage
was a moral and not a theatrical judgement,[213] which is identical to the argument that
we needn’t use boys in Bach cantatas, even though boys’ voices were surely integral to
Bach’s conception of his church music, and it’s only one step away from the old
argument that we needn’t use harpsichords because Bach would have used a Steinway
had it been available.

¶18 Peter Kivy argues precisely that. 21 ‘[S]ince we want to perform their music now, we
want to ask questions about what their performing intentions would be, given the
conditions under which their music would now be performed, not under the conditions
then prevailing.’[37] Our duty, in pursuing the ideal of performance authentic to the
composer’s intentions is to reproduce in us the impressions received by his original
audiences. An authentic performance of the opening chorus of the St Matthew Passion,
therefore, is unlikely to be achieved using the forces of Bach’s time, since the
impression they make now is less grand (Kivy proposing that for us musical grandeur is
measured against performances of the Berlioz Requiem and Carmina Burana) than
Bach intended.[53] I leave the reader to decide whether Bach might have responded to
the opening of the St Matthew Passion in the way that we respond to Carmina Burana.
To judge by his emphasis on the poor intonation of Bach-period flutes and oboes it
looks as if at the time he wrote his book Kivy had not heard many decent performances
using original instruments,[52] and one may be forgiven for suspecting that part of the
motivation for his study is a desire to defend us all from the obligation to go on listening
to them.

¶19 What I find most interesting about these arguments is that, despite the claims that
historically informed performance is, one way or another, essential to the identity of the
musical work, this idea seems never to have occurred in the philosophy of music until
individual philosophers had heard historically informed performances. In other words,
performance changed philosophy and not vice versa. It’s a neat illustration of the very
evident fact that most music philosophy is nothing more than a reasoned justification for
current musical taste. For us it’s another respect in which performance leads thinking
about music, indeed, determines what music is thought to be.

¶20 Another common, and more interesting idea discussed by Kivy is that performances
are a kind of arrangement of a work. He finds this argument relatively easy to make for
baroque music, where the performer is intended to bring material of his own to the
performance via his realisation of a figured bass or his ornamentation of a melodic
line.[131] But by seeing the things performers do with later music in order to shape
phrases (differences in note-lengths and so on) Kivy is able to argue that these personal
interventions are akin to composition and thus amount to arrangements of the
composer’s score.[132-8] This appears at first glance to offer a neat way of preserving
intact the notion that the work resides in its composer’s intentions, while allowing that
different performances are still performances of the work. But what does it really
achieve, other than to permit—because we all do permit in practice—a certain amount
of difference between an imagined work and its multiple performances? Is it anything
more than another play on words intended to save the notion that the work exists
independently of performances? We still can’t get at that imagined performance; it’s
still lost for ever; it still doesn’t exist. Like Davies, Levinson, Ingarden and other recent
philosophers of music, what Kivy cannot find a way to accept is that works exist only in
performances. Why not? Perhaps because works, to them, seem too important to be
accessible only through performers. If that’s why—and it certainly seems to be a
subtext running through most writing on performance whether by philosophers or
musicians—then it’s nothing more than intellectual snobbery of a sort that arises all too
inevitably once one begins to think of musical works, in Goehr’s sense, as creations of
genius that exist comparably and with comparable status to works of painting, building,
and sculpture. The performer cannot be allowed to function as anything more than the
artist’s loyal servant, preparing the colours, perhaps filling in the background, adding
the varnish. But music is different, and it requires different conceptualising.

Philosophy and recordings

¶21 It may be easier to see, now, why recordings are so problematic for philosophy. The
job of recordings is to sound as like performances as possible. Illusion, which
philosophy tries so hard to remove, is actually part of the very nature of recorded music.
Stan Godlovich, possibly following Fred Gaisberg, 22 but probably Theodor Adorno, 23
compares recordings to photographs, traces or records of something that happened. ‘The
temptation to neglect this’, he says, ‘likely stems from the stunning excellence of the
resemblance.’ 24 I’d like to leave to one side, for the moment, the question of how
recordings differ from concert performances as a result of the kinds of things that
happen in recording studios, because we’ll examine that in more detail later. But here
we need just to consider, for a moment, the philosophical objections to recording in the
light of what I’ve argued are philosophy’s unrealistic notions of musical performance.
Are recordings really comparable to photographs? 25 Not very directly. Photographs
freeze one moment, and in such a way as to produce something never experienced in
life. 26 In life, time does not freeze. Video or film might have offered a better analogy. 27
But it’s not at all clear that it helps us understand the relationship between recording and
performance any more precisely. Film need be no truer to life than an audio recording to
a concert performance, despite offering pictures along with the sound. Both recordings
and films allow us to experience as a continuity a collection of takes that were
performed for the recording machinery separately. One difference is that a film is much
more obviously a confection. Watching a film we all understand that (save only in
continuous recordings of live events) we are seeing only a selection of scenes chosen
from a continuity that we imagine must have happened in real time but much of which
would have been too uneventful to be presented in full with any kind of dramatic
satisfaction. But in music we expect and wish to experience the whole, which has
already been constructed in order to be dramatically satisfying without cuts. There are
two kinds of editing going on, in other words: editing for drama, and editing for
performance. A film normally uses both, a music recording only the second, but there
can be all sorts of exceptions: opera is more like film; theatre more like music
performance.; and there are always the exceptional cases, for example a recording of a
musical performance so long and undifferentiated as to be editable for drama in any way
you like without it making the slightest difference. (I have a recording of a BBC
broadcast of Cage’s HPSCHD which begins by fading into a glorious cacophony over
which the announcer says, ‘Welcome to the Round House where tonight’s Prom has
already begun…’) In any case, I’m not sure that there is a great deal to learn from the
comparison except that music recordings are typically much more like music
performances than films are like life. Recordings of concert performances do
everything, in fact, that concert performance does, except to provide a hall with
performers and listeners working around one. One can, of course, argue that recordings
provide the illusion of being performances but are truthfully something else. However,
music is not concerned with truth. Music is about how it makes us feel.

¶22 Let me be completely clear about this. Music’s fundamental purpose is to generate a
pleasurable response in the listener. Anything one might want to say about it has to
follow from that. Therefore what it sounds and feels like is the most important thing
about it. If recordings of music sound like performances that is all that is required of
them.

¶23 By ‘pleasurable’, of course, I don’t just mean ‘easy to listen to’; I intend to include
every kind of positive experience that music can generate. I want also, in glossing that
last paragraph, to emphasise the importance of listening in performing and in reading
scores. 28 Performers are, unless on autopilot, the closest listeners of all. It’s impossible
to place a note effectively, unless through habit, except by listening intently to what has
just sounded and sensing how the next note will best follow from it. At the same time
the performer takes a longer-range view, if only, in any detail, of the past few and the
next few moments. Godlovitch is therefore wrong, I think, to insist that performance
takes two, and that ‘In performance full and proper, the listener and player must be
distinct.’[42] Performers communicate with themselves as listeners because it’s
essential to performing. 29 The performer playing to herself has an audience, and a very
discriminating one. Reading a score one is, of course, performing it in one’s
imagination: it’s impossible to read music otherwise. One can look at a score, observe
patterns of notes on the page, but one cannot read it except in imagined sound. 30 There
is, in fact, no access to music except through performance. It follows that everything
necessary for performance underlies and shapes our perception and understanding of
any piece of music. The importance of this will become clearer in a moment.

¶24 So when Godlovitch claims that to place listeners on a par with composers and
performers is ‘just crazy’,[45] while I’m happy to laugh with him I have to answer that
it would be crazy not to. What Godlovitch has overlooked is that while listeners can be
separated from composers and performers, listening cannot; so that what listeners do is
what composers and performers do before they do anything else. It is through listening
that music is made.

¶25 I hope it’s becoming clearer, now, why I think that the notion of the work as
primary, and of performance and listening as secondary (or in the case of listening, even
tertiary) is mistaken. The three are much more nearly identical than that. The work is
something of which we have a sense when we listen to a performance. 31 The rest of the
time it’s just an idea. A work isn’t shown to exist by virtue of our ability to talk about it.
That we can say, ‘Beethoven’s 5th begins (the present tense implying its present
existence) with three quavers followed by a crotchet’ doesn’t mean that it exists now, as
we’re discussing it. It simply means that if we heard a performance, or imagined that
passage, those are the durations we would hear (more or less). But they don’t exist out
there, only in our minds and only when we think about them. It’s a mental construct,
nothing more. Their existence in our minds depends, as we have seen, on performance,
so that you can’t think anything very specific about a piece except within the context of
a manner of performance. This is the crucial point. We imagine those four notes
differently according to where and when we imagine them. In Berlin in the 1900s
(conducted by Arthur Nikisch) they were drawn out, admonitory, almost a warning of
what was to come; in London in 1955 (Klemperer) they were heavier, more portentous;
by 1988 (Norrington) they had become urgent and brash. Their notation may have
remained the same, but that notation is nothing more until converted into sound. And
the sound that results is unavoidably shaped by performers’ tastes in performance style.
It follows that period style and personal taste lie beneath, and play a necessary role in
determining, the identity of the musical work. Recordings, in turn, give us access to one
hundred years of changing tastes in performance style, and so of changing musical
works. If we want to know what music is, they are of the greatest possible interest.

¶26 So, we need to reconceive performance not as an add-on, a necessary evil which the
work survives only in part, but rather as integral to the identity of the work. The work,
which began life only as what the composer imagined, is now the whole recoverable
history of what performers have produced when they have performed it, 32 and of what
listeners have experienced when they perceived those performances. Consequently
when we come to consider recordings we are not considering something many stages
removed from the work—concretisations (Ingarden) or traces (Godlovich) of
instantiations (Levinson) or arrangements (Kivy) of musical works—but events during
which we create the work in partnership with musicians from the past. If we want to
know about the history of the work, they offer us the fullest evidence we shall ever
have.

Further considerations

¶27 Before we go on to look at what recordings are, two supplementary points, hinted at
above, need to be made explicit. The first has to do with music’s large-scale structure;
the second with our obligation to the composer’s notation. Both arise out of this
reassessment of the role of performance, now apparently an essential role, in all our
thinking about pieces of music.

¶28 Music happens. It doesn’t exist as an object, but only as a process. A piece of music
is thus not like a painting or—despite the attractive but misleading metaphor
‘architecture is frozen music’ 33 —music is not liquid architecture, it doesn’t assemble a
structure as it goes along, so that the completion of the piece leaves us with a
magnificent building to sit and contemplate. It’s a lovely idea, and one that has had a
whole approach to thinking about music (the analysis of form) built upon it, but it’s not
a particularly appropriate metaphor. Music exists only as it happens, and each moment
is gone as soon as it’s sounded. 34 That is not to say that a performer has no concern for
larger-scale form, though whether she does is a matter of choice. It is certainly not to
say that composers pay no attention to the structure of longer spans than the few
seconds around the ‘now’ moment of which performers and listeners are fairly fully
aware. 35 On the contrary, composers have always been concerned to find ways of
organising large spans of musical time through patterned form; and the more so since
musicology began to publish analyses of it. Quite how larger-scale form is perceived
remains to be discovered. It is an article of faith among analysts that it can be perceived,
and it seems reasonable to assume that composers thought so too. Presumably in some
way it is. But we shall have to wait for experimental psychology to show how. 36

¶29 Nevertheless, it is worth remembering, however much we may think of form as

analysts, that most of our listening is concerned with the musical sounds happening just
now. We assess them mainly in relation to what has just happened, and in expectation of
what is coming next. It’s not hard to sense the relation of a phrase that is nearing
completion to the phrase that came before: one remembers in enough detail at that level
to have a reasonably good sense of local form: at any rate, one does with a bit of
musical training. But how much any of us is aware of the span of a development in
relation to that of the exposition, or of a movement in relation to the movement that
preceded it, is another matter: clearly one is less aware the longer the spans of time. In
any case, the important point is that the musical surface matters much more when one is
listening to a piece than the musicological study of pieces leads us to believe. Most
meaning is produced from moment to moment, by gestures in sound (whether composed
or contributed by the performer) that take seconds, or less, rather than minutes. And
there is therefore a case for an analytical view of music that pays far more attention to
events at the surface than to longer-term patterning. This is something that the analysis
of performance can do rather well, taking the performance as the music, and examining
the kinds of things that performers do to give meaning to sounds. It’s one respect in
which a musicology of performance tends to produce more listener-oriented findings,
that is to say findings both derived from things heard and informative for listeners.

¶30 The second supplementary point to emphasise, concerning our obligation to the
score, is more at odds with traditional beliefs. I’ve already stressed that we can have
little knowledge of a composer’s intentions. Composers may speak about what they
want, especially in relatively modern times when there is an audience interested in what
they have to say—which was hardly the case before the nineteenth century. But words
can convey little of how one wants a piece to be experienced, which is, after all, the
most important thing. Anything one may specify, in a score or in words or by requiring
certain instruments, can be turned into a wide range of different sounds by performers
without any contradiction of those instructions. Sometimes composers can perform their
own music; and some commentators, though by no means all, will maintain that these
performances are definitive. Robert Philip has shown some of the problems that arise,
especially when performers make more than one recording of a piece, and when, as
happens frequently, they don’t follow their own written instructions. 37 Whatever the
composer’s intentions when he performs, the music will come out different, changed by
his abilities and tastes as a performer (though actually what he writes will be shaped by
at least his tastes in performance style, if not his abilities, so that may be less of an
issue, except that deficiencies as a performer may prevent him from producing the
performance style he assumed). So we have to be very wary of inferring anything
special from composers’ performances: 38 was she technically able to play the piece as
she’d imagined it or as she’d like to hear it? Was she mentally able to? Did playing it
lead her to change her conception, or to do things she’d not intended, things that made
sense while she was playing but that she wouldn’t consider part of her conception of the
piece, or that she wouldn’t think others need do? Performing isn’t like imagining-while-
composing, and it leads to different results. Faced with the notation, then, the performer
starts again from scratch, working not from the composer’s conception of the music but
just from the notation, making a new conception which becomes the beginning of the
process culminating in sounds perceived by listeners. The only constraint is that
performers—for career and ideological reasons—tend to work well within the
performing traditions for the piece in their time. Performers who don’t are very rare
indeed (Glenn Gould is the example that always springs to mind). But in principle the
performer starts afresh.

¶31 So once the composer has done his job, has written down the advice to
performers—which is perhaps how we should now consider notation 39 —and has
passed it on, the performer takes over, in effect, as the source of a piece of music. The
question then becomes, ‘How does this performer make the music happen?’. And as we
know, there is a huge number of possible answers. An awful lot can be done differently
by different performers and still leave us with something we recognise as a particular
‘work’. The work, as I’ve hinted already, is the collection of all possible recognisable
performances. Beyond that there is no way of saying what is a particular piece and what
is not. A lot can be changed and still leave the same work recognisable. It is impossible
to say how much. With a well-known piece having a strong profile in one dimension
(for example, the rhythms in parts of The Rite of Spring, or the scoring of the Prélude a
l’après-midi d’un faune) it might be possible to change almost everything in other
dimensions (for example, all the pitches) and still have some people able to recognise it.
It would be interesting to do some experiments to find out; but whatever the results, it’s
clear that the identity of the work is much looser than the score, or a text-based view of
the work, suggests. Consequently, performances that change many details of the
notation may still be acceptable performances of a work, provided only that they are
musically satisfying. 40 There seems no need to insist that the pitches, durations and so
on be exactly those notated, since it is perfectly evident to anyone who listens that a
wonderful performance can alter at least a proportion of these and still be wonderful. To
offer just two examples from among thousands that might be cited, consider Paderewski
at the end of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 59 no. 2 where Chopin specifies no pedal, a rest
before each pair of chords, and the chords played staccato; whereas Paderewski plays
the exact opposite, with pedal and legato (Sound File 1) (wav file). 41 The result is
musically entirely convincing. Or consider Harry Plunket Greene singing (in English)
‘The Hurdy-Gurdy Man’, Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’. Here the vocal durations are
changed throughout, yet, though furthest from Schubert’s text, it is surely one of the
most moving performances of this piece ever recorded (Sound File 2) (wav file). 42

¶32 Performance is a collaboration between composer and performer, a negotiation

between what the composer put down and what the performer wants to make of it.
Performer and composer are therefore on a much more equal footing than musicology
has supposed, which is why the equal billing on advertisements and discs, often decried
by critics, is actually quite appropriate. As the philosopher R G Collingwood wrote as
long ago as 1938, ‘Every performer is the co-author of the work he performs’. 43 It helps
to think of both composing and performing as improvisations: composer and performer
both improvise a performance, deciding what happens next in the light of how what
they just did turned out. 44 There are always alternatives open to them, and one can't
assume that what they decide on is the only good solution, even if it’s the best (which
one can’t be certain of). Anyhow, what gets notated is so partial a representation of
something that could so easily have been different, and of something that will be
different in important ways every time it’s performed, that one can’t sensibly see the
notation as having the force of unalterable law. We must ask ourselves, therefore, how
real is the obligation so many have always supposed that we have to stick to the letter of
the score.
¶33 The other common constraint on performers, as I’ve suggested, is recent performing
tradition. But I think it follows from what’s been said here that a decision to work
within that is one of convenience—easing career advancement—or a decision made on
principle, a moral decision, nothing to do with sound. So I’m not sure that a strong case
can be made, on musical grounds, for sticking to any particular traditions of
performance any more than to the notation. The only test is how well something sounds.
There can’t be any absolute judgement as to what is best, because it’s always possible
that another performance will be better, better for the moment at which it happens. The
composer’s instructions may be made to work well, but so may others. What matters,
ultimately, is how the brain processes sounds, not which sounds are the proper ones. 45

2.2. Musical performances

¶34 In looking at musical works we’ve already come to a number of conclusions about
performances, and I’ve argued that the two phenomena are much more nearly identical
than has traditionally been supposed. What remains to be said about performances in
general, then, can take us in a new direction, away from the notated text and towards
perception.

¶35 In order to understand what performance does we need to understand something

about how we perceive music through our ears and brains. This will be a recurring
theme of the book, so for now some general points will suffice. The way our brains
process musical sounds is in many (but not all) respects the same as the way they
process any other sounds, including speech. 46 Incoming sounds are analysed by the ear
(the basilar membrane) into their component frequency bands, and signals are sent to
the brain representing each frequency that’s present and its amplitude. The ear does a
spectrum analysis, in other words, and sends the resulting data on to the brain. The
brain’s job, then, is to decide which of these frequencies belong together and to
construct a representation of the sound in the mind and to make a best guess at its
source. 47 It does this very quickly, simply because animals that identified sounds fastest
and most accurately lived longer and reproduced more, passing on their ability. So when
we listen to music we can construct in our minds a representation of the sound sources
and follow the progress of a sequence of related sounds in real time with ease; and that
in turn leaves us with spare mental capacity to think about how these sounds relate and
the patterns that they form. Within this process the earliest reaction to incoming sounds
is automatic, with very fast onset, and causes involuntary changes in the autonomic
nervous system. 48 These changes we feel as an emotional response. While the
evolutionary purpose of these responses may be to cause us to fight or flee, we don’t
need to make that choice while listening to music (at least, not that quickly). But
precisely because it is (and has to be) an automatic response we can’t simply switch it
off. It works when we hear music just as it does when we hear any kind of sound. 49
What this means is that when we listen to music, we respond to its sounds emotionally
(pre-cortically) before we have time to think about it in any detail. 50 As the incoming
sound data passes on to the cortex, however, we are able to respond to it in more
complex ways, to consider, for example, the contexts of sounds and the structure of
longer-term sequences. 51 Emotion before form, in order words. 52 It follows that the
emotional content of a sound is absolutely fundamental to meaningful perception of it.
Performance, making sounds that make sense to us, therefore inevitably deals heavily
with emotional content.
¶36 This helps to give a useful answer to the question, What do performers do?
Essentially two things: 1) they make audible aspects of musical structure; 2) they give it
emotional force through expressivity. 53 In other words, they are delineating the
structure of music with the shapes of (the changes of feeling involved in) emotional
experience, reinforcing the cognitive appraisal of musical sounds with the shaped
feelings that for listeners momentarily precede that. To put it another way, what the
listener experiences is a feeling (pre-cognitive) followed almost instantly by the
explanation for it (cognitive); what the performer does is to emphasise the explanation
by applying a sounding representation of appropriate feeling to it. 54

¶37 The relationship between making structure audible and giving it emotional force
seems on the face of it clear: performers make structure audible by giving it emotional
force through expressivity; but it’s also likely that those events that are given emotional
force tend to be perceived as important in terms of musical structure. Thus while every
performer today will agree that gross aspects of local musical structure (phrases,
cadences, harmonic ebb and flow) require some expressive response unless a
performance is to seem mechanical, it’s also the case that performers can draw attention
to some moments and away from others so as to construct an individual reading of a
score. That there is such widespread agreement as to which moments have to be
expressively shaped may suggest that composition is more determinative of perceived
structure than is expressivity. And one might go on to suggest that, historically
speaking, habits of expressivity therefore developed in order to point up details of
compositions. But in music-evolutionary terms it seems highly likely that musical form
developed its particular characteristics (arch-shape lines, dissonance between
consonances, cadences) precisely because those features cross-domain mapped easily
between sound and emotional response. In other words, composers found ways of
composing out emotional responses to sound which performers intensify by shaping the
composition as they play.

¶38 That expressivity works just as well without much in the way of compositional
structure is suggested by the results of a recent study in which participants improvised
the expression of different emotions using a single note. 55 Musicians and non-musicians
generated similar musical effects, and (other) musicians and non-musicians agreed
substantially on what was being expressed. The study needs to be replicated among
members of a variety of musical cultures, but if the findings prove robust they will
strongly suggest that expressive performance depends on associations between sound
and feeling that long pre-date musical composition.

¶39 Patrik Juslin (2003) has helpfully defined musical performance expression as a
multi-dimensional phenomenon consisting of five components, the first two of which
are those we’re discussing at the moment: 56

• Generative rules, according to which aspects of the music’s structure are

expressed through particular kinds of shaping processes (fluctuations in timing,
loudness, or pitch) in the sound made by the performer.
• Emotional expression, conveying emotions or emotion-like experiences by
means of the same kinds of fluctuations but in this case modelling emotional
states.

¶40 Juslin’s remaining three components are to do with the means of expression, and as
we go on to look at the realisation of the first two in performances their role will
become clearer.

• Random variability, unintended irregularity that contributes to a sense that

performances have human characteristics.
• Motion principles, dynamic patterns of movement characteristic of humans.
• Stylistic unexpectedness, violations of expectations that create psychological
tension requiring subsequent resolution, leading to a shaped emotional
experience.

¶41 Juslin proposes that it will become possible to distinguish between these through
identifying different kinds of patterns for each and different neural networks involved in
their processing. The latter is highly probable, and may be enough to explain our ability
to make these distinctions. Separation in sound patterns seems less intuitively likely.
Each component is signaled by the same means namely, fluctuations in whichever of
the three dimensions of sound are available to the performer via their instrument and
consequently all five are intimately bound up together in the perceived qualities of the
music.

¶42 At any rate, making musical structure audible and giving it emotional force through
expressivity are very closely related, without seeming identical: expression signals
structure, certainly, but it’s not just a sign of structure; it’s also emotionally affective. If
they’re identical, then expression cannot operate without structure, yet we've just seen
that it needs none in the sense in which a composer would understand the concept.
Similarly, if they're identical then structure cannot be separable from expression, yet we
always assume it is. In fact, the problem we have in separating out these two things, and
in being clear about how they differ, if at all, arises precisely from this: we insist that
the musical substance—notes arranged so as to form a structure—is separate and (this is
the crucial point) has expressive content in itself that is separate from its expression in
performance. I’ve already suggested that that is a mistake, an understandable one that
arises out of our need to simplify the world and to examine one aspect of a problem at a
time, but nevertheless a crippling mistake that prevents us from seeing music for what it
is, something whose substance cannot be conceived or perceived except as expressive
performance, that is, as meaningful sound. Nevertheless, and aware now of the
artificiality of the procedure, let’s explore these two functions of performance in turn.

Making structure audible

¶43 As shown so effectively by Gestalt psychology, we try to simplify the world, so as

to make it easier to perceive, by organising things and grouping events together in our
minds. 57 This is true at a micro-level (recognising the integrity of things: sounds,
objects) and at the macro-level (grouping ideas into subjects: history, psychiatry). The
same happens in perceiving music, most obviously at the phrase level, but also (less
perceptibly, I’ve suggested above) at a larger formal level and at a note-to-note
streaming level. And composers are doing the same thing as they put notes together in
their minds and their scores. In listening we understand this partly according to natural
laws of grouping (to the extent that there are any), partly (much more) according to our
understanding of musical components and their relatedness through form and continuity
(obviously greater for expert listeners), and partly through what performers do to make
these kinds of groupings audible (which we shall examine much more closely later on).

¶44 Evolution has selected the way we group sounds as being the most conducive to
survival. It assumes that sounds close in time or in content are more likely to belong
together and to represent the same source, because in nature sounds do not change
haphazardly. 58 This is partly why timing is so important in performance: precisely how
two sounds relate in time determines precisely how we feel about them. Our perception
of sounds earlier in the evolutionary process developed using timing as information
with survival value, information that required a very fast, almost instinctive response.
Consequently timing differences mean a lot to us, and they mean it at a fast-reacting
emotional level. In addition, we call on our memory of past correct identifications. The
two processes together are sufficient to explain why and how we group sounds in music
and in musical performance.

¶45 Composers work with this, but also try to fool the brain into hearing as related
things that outside a musical context it would identify as separate; what Bregman calls
‘chimeras’. 59 Performers then try to overcome this by separating out the strands to
which they wish to call particular attention, which in the case of soloists performing
with an ensemble is likely to be their own part. Thus when singers, for example, or
pianists emphasising one or other strand, come in early, or alter the start of a note to
draw attention to it, or sing fractionally sharp, or modify their spectrum, they’re in a
sense trying to escape from that ‘collaborative intention’ and be perceived as separate—
and thus prominent—again. A literal reading of the notation tries to insist upon that
collective hearing; while a text-led view of Lieder almost requires that the singer try to
break away and dominate. 60

¶46 So, ‘what is a performance’ can be a philosophical question if we want it to be, but
as a practical question it must be answered in relation to the way the brain processes
sound, and how music works with that. It’s about grouping—how sounds are grouped
or separated in frequency, amplitude, and time (and especially time)—and it’s about
what sounds signal, what they represent, what they evoke in our minds, especially in
our memories, which means that their meanings depend on learning, culture,
experience; but the process is physiological and inherited.

Expressing structure

¶47 But none of this is perceptible except through real or imagined performance
(performance in either case). A clue to what this means, and how it works, is given by
the impossibility of a human performer giving an inexpressive performance of a score.
Because, thanks to MIDI, we now know what an inexpressive performance is like, we
know that no musician can achieve one. (Sound File 3) (wav file) 61 Two things prevent
it: first it is counter-intuitive to such an extent that we can’t do it any more than we can
speak on an unvarying pitch and at an unvarying volume; secondly, we (even the most
expert) don’t have the physical control that would make it possible. Whether these two
things are related deserves investigation. (Is expressivity through irregularity in any way
related to the imprecision of our motor control, a virtue arising out of a necessity?
Presumably not, since it’s fine motor control that allows us to decide how to be
expressive with our bodies. But equally we proverbially recognise imperfection as an
index of humanity.)
¶48 Similarly, it is impossible to read a score without responding to it on an emotional
level, without becoming engaged with the musical material and feeling something of the
excitement (or whatever) that the notes were arranged in order to evoke. And that is an
experience of performance, as is any response to the sound of music, wherever that
sound may be, whether in one’s head or coming in through one’s ears, whether
produced by oneself or by somebody else. That being so, music cannot be separated
from a response to it. It may be convenient to think of it as having some existence on
the page or as a concept, but as we’ve already seen, that is not music: it’s notation or an
idea. Music by definition sounds. And sounds evoke responses. Music and response are
part of the same system.

¶49 In that system, each listener is involved differently. Not very differently, within a
single cultural group, but differently enough for opinions about the music to differ. And
‘the music’ here cannot mean just ‘the score’; it has also to mean a performance of the
score. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between changes in
performance styles and composition styles. If the notes and their performance are
inextricably bound up together, then must not the same be true for composition styles
and styles of playing? And yet we know from a century of recorded evidence that they
are not inextricable. It’s possible that the belief that there is some special relationship
between the notes and the style of performance imagined by their composer is a belief
based in the sense that somehow music and performance do have the intimate
relationship I’m suggesting here. But it’s also obvious that neither musical substance
nor musical performance is fixed in any necessary way; in other words, you can change
some of the notes, and you can change the way you play the notes, and still have a
workable, convincing result. Thus while music and performance may be inextricably
bound up, specific styles of pieces and specific manners of performing are not: at that
level, the level of individual instances, things are much more fluid.

¶50 Does music need performers to make it? The historical development from live
performance to recorded performance to computer generated performance is thought-
provoking. We’ve moved fairly comfortably from stage 1 to stage 2, and it seems more
than likely that in due course we’ll move comfortably into stage 3.This in turn will put
philosophical arguments about intention into a new light. Imagine a performance that
was a thrilling musical performance, unexpected but convincing, deeply involving.
Would it make it any less involving to know that it was made by a computer program?
Surely not, unless we deliberately intend to be disappointed. If we accept that what
matters is how it affects us, then there’s no problem. The program originated in work by
humans, of course, though it may produce results they never imagined. But regardless
of the source of this wonderful performance, its qualities are the measure of its value. 62

¶51 This helps to explain why the notion of ‘musical’ also works on different levels.
Fundamentally, musicality is the ability to make a convincing relationship
(convincingly expressive of some meaning), expressed in notes composed or played,
between notes and performance. But exactly how that relationship is made is subject to
an enormous amount of variation. And so what is musical changes over time, because at
this more detailed level things are much more fluid. To understand what music is we
have to understand something of that variety and of the ways in which styles of
musicality change. That’s why studying performances on record is so important.

• <Back to top>
 • <Next section>

Footnotes

1.
Goehr 1992. Back to context...
2.
Traditionally attributed to Artur Schnabel. Something like it, but less all-
encompassing, was said by him to a questioner from the audience following a
talk he gave at the University of Chicago in 1945: ‘…I am now attracted only to
music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel
(rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a
never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.’ Artur Schnabel, My Life
and Music (London: Longmans, 1961), 121-2. Back to context...
3.
For Schoenberg’s view see Nicholas Cook, ‘Words about music, or analysis
versus performance’, in Cook, Johnson & Zender (1999), 11; for Boulez see Day
(2000), 222. Ernest Newman’s newspaper articles on ‘Reading and hearing’
from 1923 are shamefully symptomatic of a then widely-held view. (Ernest
Newman, More Essays from the World of Music: essays from the ‘Sunday
Times’ selected by Felix Aprahamian (London: Calder, 1958, reissued 1976),
148-55.) Back to context...
4.
Barolsky argues that Wilhelm von Lenz’s fascinating account of his friendship
with some of the great piano virtuosi of the later nineteenth century is
emblematic of this change of focus. (Barolsky (2005), 17-22). Wilhelm von
Lenz, Great Piano Virtuosos of our Time, (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983).
Back to context...
5.
Reproduced in Russell Miller & Roger Boar, The Incredible Music Machine
(London: Quartet, 1982) p. 66. Back to context...
6.
The classic statement is Philip (2004). Back to context...
7.
Walter Benjamin makes an interesting comparison between the (then) new-
found ability of Freudian psychoanalysis to notice and explain slips of the
tongue and the equally recent ability, enabled through film with sound, to
analyse human expression minutely. (Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the
age of mechanical reproduction’. in ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn,
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) 211-44 at 228-9.)
Back to context...
8.
Some basic reading on the relationship between analysis and performance (both
more and less progressive): Barolsky (2005), esp. 196, 210-20; Joel Lester
(1995); William Rothstein in Rink (1995), 217-40; Edward T. Cone in Rink
(1995), 241-53, and his Musical Form and Musical Performance (New York:
Norton, 1968); Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); George Barth, The Pianist as Orator
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Fred Everett Maus, ‘Musical
performance as analytical communication’, in ed. Salim Kemal & Ivan Gaskell,
 Performance and Authenticity in the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
129-53. Back to context...
9.
Barolsky makes a strong case for Glenn Gould as the first to dispose of it.
(Barolsky (2005), esp. 5-10.) Back to context...
10.
Barolsky suggests that we consider 'a musical performance as a musical work in
its own right’, which may be a better use for the work concept, especially where
the performance is fixed in a recording. But in any other form (and perhaps even
there, given the incompleteness of a recording’s representation of a
performance), I prefer to do away with the word altogether. (Barolsky (2005),
6.) Back to context...
11.
As Ridley says, ‘Too often in the philosophy of music the terms of the debate
have been set, not by any particular perplexity prompted by any particular piece
of music, but by issues and positions which have their real currency elsewhere in
philosophy.’ Ridley (2004), 15. Back to context...
12.
Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (London:
Macmillan, 1986). For a good general survey of Ingarden’s thought see Amie
Thomasson’s article in the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy. Back to context...
13.
Goehr, incidentally, calls musical works ‘ontological mutants’, (Goehr (1992),
3) which is also something of a cop-out, but more realistic than any of the
alternatives. Back to context...
14.
For a valuable discussion of philosophical views of ‘truth to the work’ see Butt
(2002), esp. ch. 2. Back to context...
15.
Jerrold Levinson, ‘What a musical work is’, Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980), 5-
28, esp. 20ff. For his responses to critics of this view see Levinson, Music, Art,
and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 215-63. Back to
context...
16.
Nelson Goodman goes further. For him, ‘complete compliance with the score is
the only requirement for a genuine instance of a work’. ‘If we allow the least
deviation, all assurance of work-preservation and score-preservation is lost; for
by a series of one-note errors of omission, addition...we can go all the way from
Beethoven's Fifth symphony to Three Blind Mice’. But we don’t, and his
argument shows only Goodman’s philosophical lack of interest in the realities of
music making. (Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (London, 1968), 186-7.) An
interesting critique of Goodman, allowing for perceptual evidence, is included in
Nussbaum (2007), esp. 91-4. Back to context...
17.
Matrix 5209-5, issued on Columbia LX 100 (recorded 13 Sept 1930); CD
reissue, transferred by Ward Marston, on Naxos 8.110690 (issued 2003). Back
to context...
18.
Alfred Cortot, transl. Cyril and Rena Clarke, In Search of Chopin (London,
Nevill, 1951), 58; first published as Aspects de Chopin (Paris, 1950). Back to
 context...
19.
Robert L. Martin invokes morality to argue for the more traditional view. ‘The
performer undertakes to represent the composer to the public, and is therefore
morally obliged to do so as faithfully as possible.’ (Robert L. Martin, ‘Musical
works in the worlds of performers and listeners’, in Krausz (1993b) 119-27 at
126.) But that was not the view of these pre-War performers, and in any case it’s
not at all clear that that is what any performer does (though almost all claim to).
As for the public, they may well come to hear the performer more than the
composer. Back to context...
20.
Davies (2001), 97. Back to context...
21.
Peter Kivy, Authenticities: philosophical reflections on musical performance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Back to context...
22.
Walter Legge recalled that ‘My predecessor [at The Gramophone Company],
Fred Gaisberg, told me: “We are out to make sound photographs of as many
sides as we can get during each session.”’ Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, On and Off
the Record: a memoir of Walter Legge (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
2002), 16. Back to context...
23.
Theodor Adorno, ‘The form of the phonograph record’, ed. Richard Leppert,
trans. Susan H. Gillespie, Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002) 277-82 at 278. Back to context...
24.
Stan Godlovitch, Musical Performance: a philosophical study (London,
Routledge, 1998), 14. Back to context...
25.
On Gaisberg’s metaphor see Day (2000), 32-4. Back to context...
26.
Evan Eisenberg makes a similar objection, specifically to Benjamin, in The
Recording Angel: Music, records and culture from Aristotle to Zappa (London:
Picador 1988), 40-1 & 92-5. Back to context...
27.
Theodore Gracyk has some pertinent comments on the difference between a
showing of a film and a performance of music in Rhythm and Noise: an
aesthetics of rock (London: Tauris, 1996) 24-5. Back to context...
28.
It is here that I differ with Kramer (2007), for whom, in a very similar
formulation, ‘classical music developed with a single aim, to be listened to’ (18).
For Kramer musical works remain ideal objects (23) on which performances
only comment. Back to context...
29.
Listening can in rare cases be substituted for by another sense, as with the deaf
percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who feels the sounds through her body. Back to
context...
30.
Peter Johnson prefers to separate score-reading from performance on the very
reasonable grounds that imagined sound is created by the score-reader, whereas
 the sound of an external performance has to be interpreted. (Johnson (1999), 64.)
It is very hard to discover how score-reading at its most accurate is experienced.
A definitive study will probably remain impossible until neuroscience is able to
turn thoughts into sound. Back to context...
31.
Kramer wisely cautions against believing ‘that performance can simply rescue
us from the tyranny of the work, or that idealizing performance is any better or
less tyrannical than idealizing the work’. I agree, although I think that one has to
err in that direction in order to make any impact on the institutionalised
idealisation of the work under which musicology still largely operates. As he
goes on to say, ‘The old, quasi-sacramental idea of performance as pure
realization is out of gas (or rather, alas, it isn’t).’ (Kramer 2007, 87. See also p.
76 for a conclusion about the role of performance style in our perception of the
identity of the work very close to that argued here.) Back to context...
32.
See also José Bowen, ‘The history of remembered tradition: tradition and its role
in the relationship between musical works and their performances’, Journal of
Musicology 11 (1993) 139-73. Nussbaum (2007), esp. 144-8 & 157-67, offers
the valuable notion of the musical work and its performances as constituting a
‘reproductively established family’, of which a species is otherwise the most
obvious example. Thus the musical performance and musical work are related in
much the same way as an individual organism and its genotypical plan. The
score provides the plan, but the performance is an implementation of the plan
influenced by the environment. Back to context...
33.
Usually attributed to Goethe but in this form anonymous. For its genealogy see
Tilden A. Russell, ‘On “looking over a ha-ha”’, Musical Quarterly 71 (1985),
32, n. 10. Back to context...
34.
For this view much more fully developed see especially Jerrold Levinson, Music
in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). To quote another sage,
this time authentically, 'But the hypothesis that the note exists rather than
functions is either ideological or else a misplaced positivism. ’ (Theodore W.
Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una fantasia: essays on
modern music, transl. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 287. My
thanks Myoung-Joo Rhee for this reference.) In Nicholas Cook’s view, ‘… the
extraordinary illusion—for that it what it is—that there is such a thing as music,
rather than simply acts of making and receiving it, might well be considered the
basic premise of the Western “art” tradition.’ Nicholas Cook, ‘Music as
performance’, in ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton,
The Cultural Study of Music: a critical introduction (London: Routledge, 2003),
204-14 at 208. Back to context...
35.
Eric Clarke, ‘Rhythm and timing in music’, in ed. Diana Deutsch, The
Psychology of Music (rev. ed. San Diego: Academic Press: 1999), 473-500.
Tervaniemi found that musicians, compared to non musicians, ‘have a prolonged
window of sound integration.’ (Mari Tervaniemi, ‘Musical sound processing:
EEG and MEG evidence’, in ed. Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre, The
Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), 294-309, at
303.) Back to context...
36.
A first relatively informal experiment by Cook was not promising, since it found
that music students showed no significant preference for pieces ending either as
composed or as recomposed to a different key. Nicholas Cook, ‘The perception
of large-scale tonal closure’, Music Perception, 5 (1987) 197-206. Alf
Gabrielsson & Erik Lindström, ‘The influence of musical structure on emotional
expression’, in Juslin & Sloboda (2001), 223-48, at 234, quote several studies
also showing no significant sensitivity to changes in larger-scale musical form.
Back to context...
37.
Philip (2004), 140-82. On Stravinsky’s radically changing opinions about The
Rite of Spring see Robert Fink, ‘Rigoroso ([crotchet]=126: The Rite of Spring
and the forging of a modernist performing style’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 52 (1999), 299-362. Later we shall consider a spectacular
example from Debussy. Back to context...
38.
For the rather different view from rock music see Gracyk (1996), 43. I think the
cases are more alike than has been supposed, however. Back to context...
39.
Christopher Small, Musicking: the meanings of performing and listening
(Middletown, CN.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), esp. 112. Nicholas Cook
sees notation as a script, ‘choreographing a series of real-time, social
interactions between the players: a series of mutual acts of listening and
communal gestures that enact a particular vision of human society…’, an
excellent formulation developing Small’s insights. Cook (2003), 206. Back to
context...
40.
See also Gracyk (1996), 26, on good and poor performances. Back to context...
41.
Matrix A64336A (rec. 23 December 1930), issued on HMV DA 1245, 2’ 22” –
2’ 41”. Back to context...
42.
Matrix CA 14259-1 (rec. 10 January 1934), issued on Columbia DB 1377.
Plunket Greene’s recomposed rhythms to match his English translation are
given, with commentary, in his book, Interpretation in Song (London:
Macmillan, 1948), 124-31. Discussed in Philip (2004), 138. I was delighted to
find after writing this section that Andrew Porter had used almost the same
expression in his review of a CD reissue: ‘one of the most entrancing lied
recordings ever made’ (The Observer, 12 January 1997). For an appreciation of
Plunket Greene’s recordings see Graham Oakes, ‘Harry Plunket Greene’, The
Record Collector 31 (1986), 122-6. Back to context...
43.
R. G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), 321. This is
the theme developed in Barolsky (2005). Back to context...
44.
See also Johnson (1999), 65, quoting Karajan. On the notion of performance as
improvisation see especially Cook (1990), 129. Back to context...
45.
Of course I recognise that how the brain processes sounds may be influenced by
a moral judgement about which sounds are the proper ones, but I’m arguing that
 it needn’t be, that that is an imposition from elsewhere and that music can be
made fully without it. Back to context...
46.
Stephen Handel, Listening: an introduction to the perception of auditory events
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), esp. 309, 538-9. For a full-length and
fascinating treatment of the implications of music as a sound-processing activity
like any other, see Matthew Lavy, ‘Emotion and the Experience of Listening to
Music: a framework for empirical research’, PhD thesis, University of
Cambridge, 2001. Back to context...
47.
Handel (1999), esp. chs. 3 & 8; Albert S. Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: the
perceptual organization of sound (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2nd ed. 1999)
takes a fresh and detailed look at the mechanisms. Back to context...
48.
Isabelle Peretz, ‘Listen to the brain: a biological perspective on musical
emotions’, in Juslin & Sloboda (2001), 105-34, at 115, paraphrasing Ekman.
Back to context...
49.
Laurel J. Trainor & Louise A. Schmidt, ‘Processing emotions induced by
music’, in Peretz and Zatorre (2003), 310-24. Back to context...
50.
Sloboda & Juslin (2001), 85. A detailed study of the early responses to musical
sounds is Tervaniemi (2003). On this point see especially the discussion of
expectations on p. 300. Back to context...
51.
Not surprisingly, aspects of this take longer for music than for language.
(Mireille Besson & Daniele Schön, ‘Comparison between language and music’,
in Peretz & Zatorre (2003), 268-93.) Back to context...
52.
On the modularity of musical responses in the brain see especially Isabelle
Peretz, ‘Brain specialization for music: new evidence from congenital amusia’,
in Peretz & Zatorre (2003), 192-203. Back to context...
53.
The notion of ‘expression’ causes musicologists considerable anxiety, mainly
because the word is so hard to pin down in humanistic discourse, due to its
calling on emotional experiences that by their nature are hard to define. Music in
fact offers a useful perspective on expression precisely because in music it is so
clearly generated by measurable changes in sound in relation to compositional
contexts and (in song) in relation to words. Back to context...
54.
On the induction of emotion in music see especially, Patrik N. Juslin, ‘From
mimesis to catharsis: expression, perception, and induction of emotion in
music’, in Miell et al. (2005), 85-115. Back to context...
55.
Filippo Bonini Baraldi, Giovanni De Poli, and Antonio Rodà, ‘Communicating
expressive intentions with a single piano note’, Journal of New Music Research
35 (2006), 197-210. Back to context...
56.
Patrik N. Juslin, ‘Five facets of musical expression: a psychologist’s perspective
on music performance’, Psychology of Music 31 (2003), 273-302. Back to
 context...
57.
John A. Sloboda, The Musical Mind: the cognitive psychology of music (Oxford
University Press, 1985), 154-6; Carol L. Krumhansl, Cognitive Foundations of
Musical Pitch (Oxford University Press, 1990), 138-40; Handel (1999), 185-9;
Bregman (1999) passim. Back to context...
58.
Bregman (1999) 24-5 Back to context...
59.
ibid., 460 Back to context...
60.
Bregman, 490-3 goes through a list of strategies performers use to make their
part distinctive. These could have implications for the study of performance
practice. For example, Bregman implies strongly that ragged ensemble in
accompaniment requires the soloist to be correspondingly more separated in
order to be distinguishable, which could conceivably have been one factor in the
‘inflation’ in expressivity after ca. 1900. Back to context...
61.
A plain MIDI encoding of Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28 no. 15. Back to context...
62.
Obviously the social consequences of such a development would be far-reaching
and for musicians disastrous. That won’t stop it happening, unfortunately. Back
to context...

Document Contents

• 2. Understanding the sources: Musical works and musical performances

o 2.1. Musical works
o 2.2. Musical performances

©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, England, United Kingdom.
Tel +44 (0)20 7836 5454
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Document Contents

• 3. Understanding the sources: Performance and recordings

o 3.1. How early recordings were made
o 3.2. Transferring and listening to early recordings
o 3.3. Discs and discography
o 3.4. Piano rolls
o 3.5. LPs
o 3.6. Digital sound
o 3.7. Editing and its implications

3. Understanding the sources: Performance and

recordings
¶1 If we are going to use recordings as a means of studying performances we’re going
to need to be reasonably confident, first of all, that they represent performances
sufficiently accurately to do duty for them. As with any source of evidence, their
production and original function need to be understood before we can understand what
they transmit: how were these sources made and why? Above all, we need to know
what a recording is of. A necessary step towards a musicology of recorded performance,
then, is to find out. And that means learning rather a lot about the history of recording,
its economic, social and technological history, all of which have a significant bearing on
what comes off a record when we play it.

¶2 Fortunately, some good histories of recording now exist, 1 though there is room for
much more detailed work on the technology and the way it was used in studio practice. 2
Here it is necessary only to outline the story, focussing on information that enables us to
assess the relationship between playback and original sound in recordings made by
various means at different times through the past 100 years. 3

3.1. How early recordings were made

¶3 The first machine for reproducing sound, Edison’s Phonograph, consisted of a sheet
of tinfoil wrapped around a cylindrical drum. The drum was rotated, and at the same
time moved along a metal rod, by means of a screw attached to a handle which the
operator turned. As the cylinder moved along the rod, it passed across a metal stylus,
attached to one side of a diaphragm. On the outer side of the diaphragm was a small
mouthpiece into which the operator spoke. The sound waves focussed onto the
diaphragm caused it to vibrate, which in turn caused the stylus to press into the tinfoil.
As the drum rotated and moved across the stylus a groove was embossed in the tinfoil
consisting of undulations related to the pressure patterns of the sound waves. Playback
involved placing the stylus at the beginning of the groove made during recording, and
winding the cylinder along the rod once again. The undulations in the tinfoil caused the
stylus to move in and out, and so the diaphragm to vibrate, which in turn moved the air
in the mouthpiece, recreating the sound.

¶4 As Peter Copeland has written:

The extraordinary thing about Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention for recording and
playing back sound was its apparent simplicity. There is no reason why it couldn’t have
been invented at almost any time in the previous century it used no new scientific
knowledge, no new materials, and no new technology. 4

¶5 But as I suggested in chapter 1, the difficulty must have lain not so much in the
technology as in the imagination. The idea of recording sound was so alien that it’s not
surprising that it only occurred to Edison as a possibility after he had already worked for
many years on telephony. From the electrical transmission of sound to the recording of
it is an imaginable step; from speaking to recording is not. Edison’s presentation of the
phonograph in his first patent as a telephonic repeater device shows very clearly the
imaginative route he took.

¶6 Nor does anyone seem to have been able, in the early years, to imagine an industry of
music recording. Edison lost his initial enthusiasm quite quickly, and turned his
attention to electric light, so that, as Roland Gelatt has said, ‘Mankind gained the
lightbulb, but posterity lost Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt.’ 5 It was only the appearance of
competition that, ten years later, brought Edison’s attention back to sound recording.
Only then were phonographs set up to record music on any scale, and then only as slot-
machines for use in restaurants and bars. 6 The main serious application—from the
viewpoint of the first manufacturers—was as a dictation machine, and this is how the
early commercial phonograph was marketed, often with a typewriter at its side.
Nevertheless, it was the success of the slot-machines, more than anything, that
suggested that commercial music recording was viable. The main obstacle thereafter
was the technical difficulty of manufacturing reliable copies of recordings, and this is
the principal reason why it was another decade after Edison’s ‘Improved Phonograph’
before records and players were being sold to the general public in any quantity. Only in
the very last years of the nineteenth century did classical music begin to feature in
record company catalogues. Consequently, with only a very few exceptions, surviving
recordings of classical music date from no earlier than 1897.

¶7 By then two competing technologies were available. Developing Edison’s invention

and improving its weakest point—the tinfoil, which playback soon destroyed—
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and Charles Tainter showed how a
hard wax cylinder could be used in place of the foil sheet; cylinders produced less
background noise and lasted longer.

¶8 Simpler to play and much easier to reproduce were flat discs, developed by Emil
Berliner as a way of avoiding Edison’s patent on cylinders. In Berliner’s ‘gramophone’,
developed between 1887 and 1893, the process was as different from Edison’s as
possible. The stylus moved across the recording medium, now a disc rather than a
cylinder, and recorded on it by causing the vibrating diaphragm to cut a groove which
moved in the lateral plane rather than the vertical. A track was made in a thin coating of
grease that covered a metal (zinc) disc. When the recording was finished, the disc was
place in an acid bath. The acid etched a groove in the metal where the recording stylus
has exposed it. This resulted in a ‘positive’ recording that could in fact be played.
However, early on Berliner realised that the individual recordings necessary with the
wax cylinder process were a bar to mass exploitation. He found that copies were easily
made by firstly electroplating the original disc to provide a negative version with ridges
instead of grooves. This metal negative became a stamper for producing identical copies
in a steam operated press. 7

¶9 Although gramophones and pre-recorded discs were available from 1894 it was
another four years or so before enough recorded music was available for the
gramophone to take off commercially. Berliner soon improved the reproduction process
by abandoning etching and (from 1900) using a wax master capable of spawning
multiple stampers from which many more discs could be produced for sale.

¶10 Crucial to the development of the catalogue were a series of tours, first in Europe,
but soon extending to Russia, India and the Far East, by Berliner’s agents, brothers Will
and Fred Gaisberg (by now working for the Gramophone & Typewriter Co.), who from
1902 onwards were bringing back wax masters, made often in hotel rooms, of opera
arias sung by Caruso, Tamagno, Battistini, Patti, Chaliapin and others, resulting in discs
that sold in relatively large quantities, as well as a very large collection of world music,
all subsidised (then as now) by more popular discs. 8 By 1904 the gramophone had
arrived, and when Patti made her first records in 1905 it was national news.

¶11 By our standards, the technical limitations of both technologies look crippling, but
one has to remember just how remarkable recorded sound seemed to people to whom
the idea was so new. A report in The Times on 5 October 1909 describes ‘A
Gramophone Concert’:

Yesterday afternoon, in a room at the Savoy Hotel, the temerarious gramophone

challenged comparison with the living voices of two famous singers. Mme. Clara Butt
and Mr. Kennerley Rumford appeared before an invited audience to sing certain pieces
and then to listen to the gramophone’s versions of the singing of them, taken, not on the
spot, but on some previous occasion. Mme. Clara Butt sang Mr. Landon Ronald’s
“Believe me if all those endearing young charms” to the composer’s accompaniment at
the piano; then Mr. Ronald remained at the piano and, while the gramophone gave its
reproduction of Mme. Butt’s singing of the song, accompanied it once more with the
soft pedal down. Mr. Kennerley Rumford sang Maud Valérie White’s “King Charles,”
so familiar in the voice of Mr. Plunket Greene, and the gramophone repeated it; and the
singers joined in two duets, Mme. Lehmann’s “Snowdrops” and the “Night Hymn at
Sea.” It must be admitted that the gramophone came very well through its ordeal. The
instrument has improved so much of late that we have almost forgotten the days when it
began every piece with an imitation of cats fighting. Had we not just listened to the
singers viva voce we should certainly have declared the gramophone’s a wonderful
imitation. Wonderful, indeed, it is—and it seemed more wonderful than ever under the
conditions of yesterday’s performance—in the mere fact of its singing at all and
reproducing so unmistakably the voices we had just heard. But with Mme. Clara Butt’s
tones still ringing in our ears it was impossible not to notice that it had introduced a
faint nasal tinge into her lower notes and tightened some of her higher notes so as to
give the impression that her throat was not fully open. The volume of sound it could
hardly hope to equal; but something remains yet to be done in the direction of quality.
An odd little weakness on the instrument’s part is its inability to pronounce sibilants—it
lisps. Otherwise the words were extraordinarily clear. Some of the other selections from
the répertoires of Mme. Butt and Mr. Rumford which formed the rest of the programme
showed a very unsatisfactory reproduction of the orchestral accompaniments, which
suggested a wheezy harmonium. But it remains wonderful that any mechanism should
do what the gramophone does. 9

¶12 Quite how listeners could have been so impressed is hard for us to imagine (even
with modern replay equipment which reveals details recorded but never heard at the
time). But for them, far more striking than the surface noise and the poor frequency
response (not even mentioned here) was the fact that the voice was recognisable at all. 10

Later acoustic recording

¶13 In order to understand the way early recordings sound, and what that means for the
kinds of things we can learn from them, we need to look at the whole process of
recording in the early days, and then look at an example in that light. Rather than try to
cover the huge range of slightly different techniques used at different places and times,
let’s imagine a recording made onto disc in about 1920. 11

¶14 The recording medium was a form of hard wax, prepared at the factory in vats,
filtered to keep the mixture as smooth as possible and, after cooling and hardening,
turned on a lathe in order to produce a smooth surface. The resulting wax tablets were
packed in cases and sent out to the studios or, for recordings elsewhere, along with the
technicians’ baggage. (Fred Gaisberg reports taking 600 on a year-long trip to India and
the Far East in 1902-3, and bringing close on 600 recordings back. 12 ) For recording, the
wax tablet was placed on the turntable of the recording machine, where it rotated, in
theory (though by no means always in practice) at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). The
whole turntable assembly moved sideways beneath the cutting head so that a groove
was cut in the wax from the outer edge of the wax disc towards the centre. Because it
was attached directly to the horn, the cutting assembly was fixed. The stylus was moved
by a (usually glass) diaphragm, and, depending on how efficient the connections were,
pressure was transmitted more or less accurately. Sound was transmitted to the other
side of the diaphragm through tubular connections leading from the narrow end of the
recording horn, while the horn itself captured and focussed as much of the performers’
sound output as possible. Horns tended to have resonances of their own, which were
damped as far as possible by wrapping tape around them. Multiple horns could be used
to capture sound from a larger group of performers or from different parts of a piano,
for example, and these were connected up via Y-shaped metal connectors joined to the
horn with rubber tubing. The horns were suspended from (or occasionally supported on)
stands to minimise strain on the cutting mechanism.

Plate 1: Edward Elgar and musicians posing at a 1914 recording session

¶15 If we look at a picture of a recording session some of this will become clearer
(Plates 1 & 2).

Plate 2: An acoustic recording session for the Victor label

¶16 The recording machinery, as in almost all the surviving photographs, is out of sight.
Partly this was to cut out the noise, though given the insensitivity of the horn and all the
noise generated along the way, it is unlikely to have been audible on disc; partly it was
to protect company secrets. What we can see is the horn, suspended by a wire and
wrapped with tape; and we can see the very unorthodox arrangement of the musicians in
front of it. Although one might suspect that the crowding of the musicians is for the
photographer’s convenience, in fact there is ample period evidence that this was normal
and necessary in order to get the best possible balance of sound focussed into the horn.
Stanley Chapple, in a 1928 issue of Gramophone, provides a floor plan of such a
session. 13

Plate 3: A two-horn acoustic recording layout (1928)

¶17 Two recording horns are used, with the violins (which recorded least well) nearest
to them. Squashed around them are the woodwind players, who would have been
reinforcing the string parts. Behind them, but higher, were most of the brass, the French
horns facing backwards in order to direct the sound from their bells into the recording
horn, the players following the conductor in a mirror. The conductor is pushed out of
the way to the side where he can be seen but doesn’t obstruct the sound. Bassoons
reinforce the cellos, and a tuba and contrabassoon replace double basses, which would
not have recorded adequately. 14

Plate 4: An acoustic recording session for voice and piano

¶18 Plate 4 shows a typical studio layout for a recording of voice with piano
accompaniment. The piano is an upright because its sound was more effectively
focussed into one horn. The horn is hung right in front of the singer’s mouth, and the
piano is set above and behind the singer at a height that ensures that the maximum
amount of piano sound enters the horn. Pianists were instructed to play fortissimo
throughout. 15 Singers, on the other hand, had to move towards the horn for quieter
passages, and away for louder notes to avoid distortion. Inexperienced soloists were
guided back and forth by an assistant (sometimes on trolleys). 16 One other thing
noticeable from many photographs is the appearance of the men in shirtsleeves. Because
the wax has to be soft enough to cut cleanly recording rooms had to be uncomfortably
warm. It seems safe to assume that some of the appalling intonation one often hears on
early recordings of strings and woodwind was caused by the heat.

¶19 Recording proceeded in takes as long as one wax blank took to fill: for early
cylinders and discs this was about two minutes; for later cylinders three and then (from
1908) four minutes; for a ten-inch disc a little over three minutes; for a twelve-inch
three at first, and later up to four and a half. 17 Pieces that played for longer than this had
either to be played quickly (for which there is some evidence, 18 though not as much as
is sometimes suggested) or—and this was much more common—had to be cut. 19 If a
piece or movement were being recorded that lasted much longer than one side,
recording stopped at a musically convenient point in the score, and then continued later
when a new wax tablet was in place and everyone was ready to resume. Sometimes
side-ends were composed by an arranger, for example adding a perfect cadence to what
would otherwise have been an open-ended musical phrase; mostly the musicians closed
a side with a modest ritardando. 20 (The consequences of this for performance analysis
will become clearer later.)

¶20 After the recording session was over the wax masters were returned to the factory
for electroplating. 21 This produced a negative metal copy which was used to stamp a
test pressing. If the musical results and sound quality were considered satisfactory,
further negatives were made and nickel-plated for use as stampers. (An alternative
method was to use the negative to make a positive from which harder negative stampers
could be made, and there were other approaches, but the principle was the same.) In
some cases (mainly reissues of very early discs) this metal master had the shape of its
groove adjusted in the interests of better long-term results from the shellac copies, and
this process must to some extent have altered the sound. 22 The negative metal stampers
were then used to stamp copies in shellac, either pressed against a blank for single-sided
discs, or against another stamper for double-sided. Once the metal negative was made
the original wax master was returned to the lathe to be planed smooth and reused. The
shavings, along with tablets now too thin to reuse, went back to the vats for recycling.
Over time the stampers became worn, with consequent deterioration in the sound of the
shellac discs. Eventually quality became sufficiently compromised for the metal
stamper to be abandoned. Provided more stampers could be made from the metal master
this wasn’t a problem; but if that was no longer possible then two options remained;
either an existing disc had to be re-recorded onto a new wax master 23 —which meant all
the original noise was recorded too, and added to the noise produced through the new
recording—or the artists had to be assembled again and a new performance made.

Misrepresentations in early recordings

¶21 Reading through this description, it’s not hard to see that some quite serious
compromises are made in order to produce sounds the machine is capable of recording.
Both what went in and what came out were far from representative of ideal music-
making at the time. Moreover, there were very significant distortions in the recording
and playback of the sound, as we shall see in a moment. Clearly, if we are to use these
recordings for study it is essential that we understand what these compromises and
distortions are, how they arise, how they affect what we hear, and how we might be able
to compensate for them.

¶22 Let’s begin with disc speed. Readers old enough to remember LPs or 78s, or anyone
familiar with DJ techniques, will know that if the speed of a disc changes the pitch
changes with it: a rise in speed brings a rise in pitch. Consequently if a record is played
at anything other than the speed at which the master was recorded the pitch of the music
will be wrong. Ways of establishing exactly what pitch the musicians were using, and of
ensuring that the final discs played at the correct speed were, in theory, available but
would have been impractical in most recording situations. In a very warm studio it was
inevitable that pitch would rise during a session. The machinery driving the cutting
turntable would have been hard to regulate, was subject to variations during
manufacture, and could change speed in different atmospheric conditions and over time.
Even the cooling and hardening in the wax during recording, slowing the progress of the
cutting head, could make a difference. Consequently there can be not only problems in
establishing the correct speed at which to play a disc, but there can also be changes of
pitch during playback. Gramophones were equipped with devices for varying the
playback speed. Few were precise, or even precisely marked. ‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’ were
generally stamped on a guide, and one moved a lever in one direction or the other.
Although most discs play somewhere around 76-80rpm, speeds can on occasion be as
low as 60 or as high as 90rpm. To put it into perspective, at 78rpm a difference of c.
4.5rpm produces a difference of a semitone in pitch, so the differences may not be
negligible. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

¶23 A singer speeded up by a semitone can sound very significantly different, as a

comparison of modern reissues of Adelina Patti shows. Patti was one of the most
famous singers of the 19th century, and yet, as we’ll see in chapter 4, what you think she
sounded like depends on the speed at which you play her recordings. And about that,
modern CD transfers have widely differing views. There is no scientific solution to this
problem. All one can do is hear as many recordings of a performer as possible and
gradually form an idea of the sound she makes, then test any one disc against that
impression, adjusting the speed until she sounds ‘right’. Of course one’s impression
may be based on so many mistaken speeds that one’s quite wrong. All we can do is
discuss the results among experienced listeners and hope to agree, more or less. Similar
problems occur in more modern recordings because of differences among tape
machines, cutting lathes and playback equipment. To make things worse, pitch was not
necessarily fixed by the musicians at A=440Hz, and singers frequently had pieces
transposed to suit their voices: neither fact was noted on the disc. Nothing but musical
instinct can guide us here. 24

¶24 Next let’s look at general considerations of sound quality. Cylinders were capable
of surprisingly good sound quality, which may be partly why Edison stuck with the
technology for so many years after every other manufacturer had gone over to discs,
until 1929 in fact. 25 Both because the stylus moved up and down in the groove instead
of side to side, so not interfering with adjacent grooves, and because the stylus moved at
a constant speed (on discs it moves much faster nearer the outer edge of the disc than
near the centre), cylinders at their best could provide more consistent results. But they
were less successful commercially: they were harder to duplicate, so cost more; they
took up much more storage space; they required a more complex playback mechanism;
and, although it may seem trivial, they lacked the attractive and convenient centre label
on which so much useful information about the disc’s contents could be printed. 26 So
the technology that succeeded in the marketplace was in some ways not the best
available (not for the last time). 27

¶25 On early cylinders and discs much the most successful instrument for recording
(after the brass band) was the voice, and especially the coloratura soprano and tenor.
The reason for this is the limited frequency response, which was confined at first
between about 150 and 2000Hz, enough to give a good representation of the frequencies
constituting vocal colour, but not enough to give a good approximation of most
instruments. It helped that high voices could also generate a lot of energy. Closest in
effectiveness were wind instruments, with strings far behind. Consequently, most of the
earliest recordings are of singers, followed by military bands. 28 The results we have
already seen in the layout of a typical session ensemble. Pieces had to be rescored,
replacing lower strings with wind—hence the ever-present tuba pumping the bass in
opera arias. In addition, violins, when used at all, were routinely replaced (from about
1902) by Stroh violins, a device invented by Augustus Stroh that played like a violin but
replaced the body with a diaphragm attached to a horn, which amplified the upper
frequencies. There are several in Plate 2. As we have seen, pianos had to be played
fortissimo, and right into the singer’s ears; and we have seen how in ensemble
recordings all the musicians were playing loudly and right on top of one another.
Singers were required to exaggerate vowels, roll their Rs, sing S as Sh, 29 and had to
maintain the most even tone possible, at the same time as moving towards and away
from the horn as required. In these sorts of conditions, anything like a normal musical
performance must have been extremely hard to produce. All this we need to bear in
mind when listening to the results; it may have important consequences for the kinds of
things we can safely say about details of performances.

¶26 Sound File 4 (wav file) is a transfer without noise reduction from a 1921 recording
of Frieda Hempel singing Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ (Ellens Gesang III). 30 The disc has
been transferred at 78rpm because it gives a plausible key (A major) for her voice as we
know it from recordings (always bearing in mind the circularity of the argument):
Schubert’s notation is in B-flat, but this recording sounds less satisfactory there.
Schubert’s piano accompaniment has been rescored for harp, harmonium, violin, and
cello, not in this case because piano would have recorded less well but simply because
in 1921 it had long been customary to see this song as extremely sentimental, and this
ensemble offers the opportunity to squeeze every last ounce of saccharin from the score.
The violin part is a study in unrestrained portamento, the harmonium piety in sound.
With singer and all the instruments crowded round the horn the balance is curious, the
violin a little distant (perhaps fortunately) and the harmonium a little closer than one
might wish. Most striking of all for a modern listener is the very high level of surface
noise, much higher than we’ve come to expect listening to CD transfers which are
invariably treated with digital noise reduction. This noise had several sources including
problems with the recording machinery, the nature of the materials of which the disc is
made, imperfections in and damage to the disc surface, and the misfit of stylus to
groove. 31 Sound File 5 (wav file) presents a much earlier recording of the same song
from 1905, 32 with Albert Piccaluga accompanied by a 2-manual Mustel harmonium
with a celesta stop for the right hand, producing a sound somewhere between piano and
harp. One might otherwise have been tempted, given the poor sound reproduction at this
date, to assume it a piano, which just goes to show how careful one has to be. (The
identification in this case comes from the original record label.) 33 Karsten Lehl, who has
kindly provided the transfer of a disc in his collection, has speeded up the turntable by
as much as 7.3% in order to pitch the performance in A and to give the voice what he
feels is the right timbre (Piccaluga was a baritone). Where Hempel had a full-length 12-
inch disc at her disposal, and used all four and a half minutes of it, Piccaluga has a
27cm (10¾ inch) disc and has to make do with two stanzas. The German poem set by
Schubert has been replaced with the Latin Roman Catholic ‘Ave Maria’ to make the
piece fully religious. The surface noise is of a slightly different type here, with a swish
that’s very characteristic of early acoustic recordings (and very hard to remove today).
Sound File 5a (wav file) offers the same transfer, this time with digital noise reduction.
Because the musical signal is so limited in frequency range at this early stage of
recording a lot of noise can be removed without damaging the music. Even so, the result
is still fairly grim. All in all, there is little about these recorded performances that we
would recognise today as ‘correct’ or acceptable, either in the arrangements, the
performances, or the recordings. Listening to them with understanding, not just
amusement, requires us to know a surprising amount about how they were made.

¶27 In fact there is much that could be said about these performances, and in the light of
later chapters readers may like to come back to them and work on them for themselves.
But first we must focus on the shortcomings of the manufacturing process, since
without understanding that we have little hope of commenting usefully on the music it
obscures. 34 Imperfections in the composition of the wax tablets could produce unwanted
resonances. Any irregularities in the progress of the cutting stylus through the wax
produced undulations in the wax, in addition to those made by the sounds being
recorded, and these would generate unwanted noise at playback. The problem was
exacerbated by a worn stylus or a fractionally incorrect cutting angle. The various
components of the recording machine could combine to emphasise certain frequency
bands (and we’ve already mentioned horn resonances). Irregularities could develop
during the electroplating of the wax master, and surface imperfections during the
pressing and cooling of the shellac copies. Moreover the shellac—a compound of
various fillings bound together by a lacquer made from ground Indian beetle—needed
to consist of particles of varied sizes in order to ensure strength, and the roughness that
resulted helped to wear the tip of the steel needle to the shape of the groove, ensuring
better response to the details of sound recorded along the groove walls; yet at the same
time the roughness in the shellac compound produced further noise. 35 Finally distortions
of various kinds were inevitably generated by the playback mechanism through the
connections of stylus, diaphragm and horn at the output stage. Only through
understanding these various sources of surface noise and distortion (as George Brock-
Nannestad has persuasively argued) can we begin to think about how to compensate for
them.

¶28 The process and problems I’ve described so far apply especially (but not by any
means only) to acoustic recording, those systems in use until 1925 where sound
pressure generated by the performer is applied through mechanical connections to the
stylus cutting the wax. The situation was transformed almost overnight, with remarkable
benefits for musical recording, when electrical systems were introduced commercially
in America in February 1925. Three inventions were essential, the microphone, the
vacuum-tube (‘valve’) amplifier, and the electromagnetic cutter-head. For the rest it was
a matter of redesigning the machinery and training recording engineers to use it.
Electrical recording brought several major advantages: first, frequency response
improved dramatically, immediately doubling the range that could be captured up to
5000Hz (which had almost doubled again by the end of the 78 era), and extending it
down as low as 60Hz; secondly, mechanical resonances were largely eliminated, so the
sound was coloured less by the equipment; thirdly, the electrical systems allowed studio
control of many parameters of the sound, including balance; and last but perhaps most
important of all, it suddenly became possible to record almost any kinds of sound in any
environment. Replacing the horn with the microphone meant that performers no longer
needed to shout or play unnaturally loudly; they could be spread out over a much wider
area; and it was no longer necessary to re-orchestrate. 36 Recording could take place in
concert halls, opera houses, cathedrals, or even in the open air. Not every problem went
away, however. Discs were still cut in wax and stamped in shellac; pitches and speeds
were still variable; there was still surface noise. 37 But nevertheless the increase in
naturalness and detail is very striking, even to a modern listener. Sound File 6 (wav file)
presents a 1935 recording, without noise reduction, of Schubert’s ‘Die junge Nonne’
sung by Germaine Martinelli in French (‘La jeune religieuse’) accompanied by an
orchestra conducted by Eugène Bigot. 38 (Sound File 6a (wav file) is a version with
digital noise reduction.) Two things will strike you immediately: the surface noise is
considerably reduced—in fact this was not a by-product of electrical recording but
simply the result of improved manufacture—and the orchestral sound is far more
realistic. Unlike the ‘Ave Maria’ recordings, this time we can hear a full orchestra with
something like a natural sound: even the timpani and double basses are clearly audible,
and all the instruments are plausibly balanced. 39

3.2. Transferring and listening to early recordings

¶29 I think enough has been said about the making of early recordings, especially on
78rpm discs, to make it pretty obvious that the performances they carry need to be
interpreted with great care. We can’t listen to them and hear the sounds an audience at a
live performance would have heard then. What we may be able to do, knowing enough
about what happened between performer and disc, is to begin to imagine the sorts of
sounds that would have given rise to what comes off the discs, given that means of
recording. It’s very hard to do. It would be considerably easier if we could listen to
modern recordings made simultaneously on modern and on early equipment.
Experiments have been done, but as yet none of the results has been published on disc.
40
It is probably, however, one of the most useful experiments that could be done at this
stage in research, and an adequately resourced research program that brought together a
range of original equipment with the few people in the world who have any idea of how
to use it would be hugely valuable. Looking at the problem from the other end, it is not
difficult, using digital editing, to introduce surface noise from shellac discs and speed
fluctuation into modern recordings, and while it’s a poor substitute for properly set up
recording sessions it’s quite informative. 41

¶30 Lacking a reliable measure, then, of the effect that early recording processes have
on sounds, we have to fall back on our imaginations and try to listen through the noise
and through all the other distortions of pitch and colour. While wholly unscientific, it’s
surprisingly helpful. I can’t demonstrate it, so I can only seek to persuade you that with
practice one does begin to find early recordings much easier to listen to; and it becomes
simpler to understand how it was that so many millions of discs were sold, and records
reviewed with such enthusiasm. Indeed, this was the experience of the original listeners:
an article in The Times from 1922 commented on just this phenomenon.

But the very defects of the gramophone record have their compensation. They
encourage close listening. If, for example, one has intensely enjoyed the perfect
ensemble of the Flonzaley Quartet playing Schumann, the first feeling on hearing the
gramophone reproduction may be one of disappointment. The magical tone has fled and
the constant burr of the revolving disc is very present to the ears. It is extraordinary,
however, the extent to which one can forget the burr as one concentrates the mind to
catch the balance of phrase with phrase, the interweaving of the instruments, the details
which distinguish line from colour, to use the phraseology which music has borrowed
from another art. The gramophone record used in this way is, in fact, a close analogy to
the faithful photograph, a thing which acquires its value from our knowledge of the
original, and serves not only to recall but to deepen appreciation of the original. It seems
at present that only a very small proportion of the great originals of music have been
provided with these photographs; but their number is being increased daily, and old
ones are being scrapped in favour of better ones as makers realize more insistently that
musical people are looking for the best. 42

¶31 Listening on original equipment, then, is not, from an artistic point of view, such a
crazy idea, nor necessarily (though it sometimes is) a social mannerism. A horn
gramophone, if it has been expertly maintained, can be a very satisfactory reproducing
instrument from a musical point of view; and it’s well worth trying to hear one. 43
Portables are still reasonably cheap and surprisingly good, not to say astonishingly loud.
But there are excellent conservation reasons for not using valuable discs on them, since
discs wear out far more quickly on original than on modern equipment, and to make
matters worse few non-specialist users are inclined to insert a new steel needle for each
side played, still less to make their own thorn needles which are a safer and musically
preferable alternative. Very few people still use original equipment, then, and in most
cases it’s probably just as well.

Transfers

¶32 The vastly increased interest in early recordings which has characterised recent
years comes, of course, from reissues on CD. There are good reasons why this has
happened— early recordings preserve wonderful performances that, once one’s got used
to their very different style, can give as much pleasure as (often more than) modern
performances—and there are much less admirable reasons. With the market for new
recordings of classical music in steep decline, it’s far easier for the record companies to
make money if they simply reissue recordings they already own. In Europe (though this
may be about to change), recordings are out of copyright 50 years after the date of issue
(provided that the music performed is not still in copyright: the law there covers the
composer or arranger until 70 years after their death). In the US copyright law is far less
favourable, and copyright not only has a much longer duration, but can be extended
indefinitely by making reissues. For companies operating in Europe, then, it became
extremely cost-effective to transfer recordings issued originally on cylinders and 78rpm
discs, especially of out-of-copyright classical music, and reissue it on CD; and many
small companies have produced more or less impressive results alongside the big hitters
like EMI exploiting their own recording past.

¶33 So most of the early performances we encounter today are available easily and
cheaply on CD. And on a single CD one can get up to forty two-minute cylinders, or at
least twenty single-sided twelve-inch discs, each of which might have cost as much as
£1 a hundred years ago, about a third of a teacher’s weekly wage at the time, and around
a thirtieth of a barrister’s, which gives us an idea of the market for the most expensive
celebrity discs. 44 There’s not much doubt that we are fortunate to have so much
available for so little. Even if you cost a double-sided 78 at 50p from the local charity
shop, a bargain-priced CD reissue with its ease of use, an accompanying booklet, and all
the work that’s gone into the transfer is a pretty good deal.

¶34 But it’s ‘all the work that’s gone into the transfer’ that’s the problem. Consumers of
classical music, which is more or less how the record companies view us, expect
realistic sound, steady speeds, a quiet background, and continuous music from start to
finish. For transfer engineers, extracting performances from cylinders and 78s, that
means a lot of intervention and editing: in other words, the sounds get changed. Let’s
look at the process and try to identify the sorts of modifications that get made and
consider their consequences for us when we study the performances. 45

¶35 It’s important to say right away that transfer engineers are mainly freelancers,
enthusiasts for early recordings who have spent many years working with discs and
cylinders, and have accumulated a huge amount of knowledge of the sources. Many
have a professional recording background. Each one has a toolkit of procedures,
developed through informal learning—gained from reading the professional journals,
bulletin boards, books, and from talking to colleagues—and through experience, the
latter closely tied to the particular collection of equipment they prefer to use. Each has
their own musical preferences that lead them to aim towards particular kinds of sound.
While rough transfers can be done in no longer than it takes to play the original, most
work at this level is done with great care over many hours of meticulous trial and error.
It’s a complex mixture of technique and taste. 46

Choosing the disc

¶36 The first step is to find the best possible copy of the original issue; that means the
least worn or damaged. Sometimes, if the disc is rare or unique, there’s no choice; on
other occasions there may be thousands of copies surviving, and in that case it’s a
matter of drawing on reliable collections and selecting the best copy that can be found.
A few companies have retained at least some of their metal masters, and in that case an
in-house transfer engineer has access to the best possible material (EMI is the prime
example). National sound archives and broadcasting organisations generally have very
large collections, though few will allow users to make their own copies, so on the whole
transfer engineers will avoid them unless there is no alternative. If they must, they will
ask for a ‘flat transfer’, one with as little modification to the sound as possible: a set
speed, no filtering or noise reduction. More commonly copies are borrowed from
collectors—the world of early recording enthusiasts is generous and cooperative—or
made in the few archives that allow users to handle originals. Some transfer engineers—
though fewer than one might imagine—have their own collections: on the whole the
collecting bug and the need to make a living from recordings are not economically
compatible.

Cleaning

¶37 Next the disc (for simplicity I shall say disc from now on, but similar points apply
to cylinders) is cleaned. Over 50 to 100 years a certain amount, often a great deal of
muck accumulates in the grooves and gets smeared across the surface of a disc, and
getting rid of it makes a huge difference to the quality of the sound, allowing the stylus
to track the groove rather than the film of grime adhering to it. There is, needless to say,
much debate about the best ways of cleaning 78s. Many professionals use a record
cleaning machine, looking something like a record player, that uses a brush to spread
cleaning solution over a disc spinning on a turntable and then an arm to suck it off,
bringing the dirt with it. What solution should be used on different materials is a matter
for intense debate. For 78s a solution of triple distilled water mixed with tiny quantities
of washing-up liquid is recommended by many, and produces impressive results, but
there are concerns among those who have examined the whole question scientifically
about the longer-term damage that residues may do. This isn’t a matter we need solve
here, but it is characteristic of the whole field that it remains an unresolved issue. 47
More serious cleaning may be required for discs growing mould or fungus.

Repairs

¶38 When the only available disc is damaged repairs must be made. This may involve
temporarily gluing together the pieces of a broken disc, in which case clicks made as the
pickup stylus tracks across each join in every groove will have to be removed from the
sound later on. (An expensive but interesting alternative is a laser player, which in
theory can play broken discs. Results, however, are mixed and as yet they are not
widely used.) 48 Other kinds of repairs include rebuilding damaged groove walls, which
can be done under a microscope with suitable materials, and filling in chips in the edge
of the disc. In the latter case music may well be lost, and it will need to be supplied
from elsewhere—copied from another point in the disc if available, or from another
performance if not.

Playing the disc

¶39 Nowadays most playing of early recordings is done on modern electrical

equipment, either a suitable turntable, arm and cartridge; or the equivalent for cylinders,
now made in much smaller quantities but to very high standards. 49 A few engineers and
companies, however, use original equipment as a matter of principle, aiming to produce
the sounds expected by the original engineers and listeners. Here the technique at its
most purist involves nothing more than using a microphone to record the sound
produced from a horn gramophone, though more complex setups are possible. 50 More
typical is to use a modern motor-driven turntable with standard speed settings of 33 ,
45 and 78rpm, and a wide-ranging variable speed control with digital readout so that
exact speeds can be set or speed can be varied by exact amounts during the playing of a
disc. As we’ve seen, the transfer engineer will have to decide on a musically plausible
speed and pitch, and will have to ‘correct’ any changes in pitch during the playing of the
disc, changes that occurred originally because of cooling wax, or winding down drive
mechanisms, or otherwise imperfect equipment or operation. Speed fluctuation in LPs
may be caused by accidents as simple as an operator brushing against a moving tape
reel during the cutting of the master disc.

Stylus

¶40 The choice of stylus is crucial, and makes most difference to the sound after
cleaning. Because there was no standardisation of cutting styli or angles, and also
because discs wear in different ways according to the kinds of needles used to play them
in the past, grooves can be different shapes and sizes, and the least damaged part of a
groove may be accessible to smaller (if it’s near the bottom) or larger styli. Transfer
engineers therefore have a dozen or more different styli available: bi-radial, conical, and
in various sizes. The skill with which they are chosen can have a very significant effect
on the results. Sometimes different styli track different parts of the disc most
effectively, and in that case the end result will be made from several transfers edited
together. There are no rules about the choice of styli: the engineer simply chooses
whichever sounds best to her. 51

EQ

¶41 From the stylus/cartridge assembly the electrical signal will usually go to an
equalising pre-amplifier. 52 As with any equipment, the construction of the amplifier can
colour the sound to some degree (valve (tube) equipment especially), but far more
important is the nature of the equalisation. Equalisation involves increasing or
decreasing the amplitude (loudness) of certain frequency bands, usually gradually over a
range of frequencies, in order to compensate for reductions or increases introduced
during the cutting of the master. Because bass frequencies made the cutting stylus cut a
groove with more sideways movement, the stylus on playback has more difficulty
tracking it, and fewer grooves (less music) could be fitted onto a disc. It was the
practice, therefore, to reduce the volume level at lower frequencies when cutting, and
for the playback system to restore the relative levels via suitable circuits in the
amplifier. At the other end of the spectrum, high frequencies produced less signal
strength compared to the amount of noise, and again the playback equipment had to be
set up in such a way as to compensate.

¶42 In theory, acoustic recordings need no equalisation, since the original engineers had
no means of altering the balance of frequencies during mastering. But as we have seen,
the nature of the equipment, especially the horn, introduces changes to the balance of
frequencies, and modern equalisation can be used to compensate for that. If so, it can
only be done by ear as a matter of taste and experience, supported by knowledge of the
original recording process.

¶43 For electrical recordings, however, the situation is quite different. Electrical
amplification between microphone and cutting stylus offered engineers the opportunity
to modify the recording characteristic, as I’ve described, and the advantages in disc
length and sound quality were considerable. On the other hand, this left the
manufacturers of playback equipment with the obligation to introduce equalisation in
order to compensate. The main difficulty for them, and for us, is that no two companies
applied the same characteristics, nor were the discs from one company necessarily
consistent. Even two cutting machines could produce different results; and engineers
could decide, either on the spot in the studio or as a matter of company policy, to
modify the equalisation in order to produce the sound they wanted. Consequently,
although a great deal of knowledge has been accumulated through experience, and
attempts have been made to standardise and publish some of it, 53 choosing equalisation
settings when transferring electrical recordings is as much an art, subject to taste, as
choosing playback speeds or selecting styli.

Noise reduction

¶44 Once the signal has passed through the equalisation stage, the next consideration is
whether and how to apply noise reduction in order to remove as much of the original
surface noise as possible. There can be a very great deal of it, both the result of the
recording and stamping process and through wear and damage to the disc. The
background noise from a 78—a continuous mix of hiss, crackle, and clicks—is usually
relatively loud and sometimes overwhelms the musical signal. To most CD buyers it
would be totally unacceptable. Noise can be reduced somewhat by using a filter to
remove all the frequencies that could not have been recorded on the disc. For practical
purposes, for most 78s until quite late on, any signal above about 5000Hz is almost
certainly noise and not content. Cutting it out should produce an immediate
improvement in the sound. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, partly because the brain tends to
assume that if it can hear high frequencies in the hiss it can hear them in the music too.
So when one cuts off all high frequencies the music sounds dull. To an extent it’s an
aural illusion, 54 but disturbing nevertheless. Some hiss can be musically beneficial,
therefore.

¶45 Much of the noise we’d like to remove, however, lies within the same frequency
band as the musical sounds on the disc. 55 There are essentially two approaches at the
moment to reducing it. One is to edit out the worst of it in a digital sound editor, cutting
out the clicks one by one: usually they are so short that the ear cannot tell that the
musical note has been minutely shortened. The other, and more commonly used
method, is to employ automatic noise-reduction, either through a software program or
through dedicated hardware such as CEDAR. In either case an algorithm attempts to
identify noise and to remove the frequencies that constitute it. Naturally this can only be
done with digitised sound, so a further stage is necessary in which the output from the
equalising pre-amp is converted, by an A/D converter, to the digital domain for further
processing. Clearly noise-reduction changes the information taken off the original disc
in a big way. It’s very easy to overdo, producing a relatively silent background but a
thoroughly unnatural sound, and there are some truly awful examples available on CD.
A promising alternative approach currently under development involves photographing
discs and converting the shape of the groove into digitally generated sound, but at the
time of writing it remains to be seen whether this will work on a commercial scale
(bearing in mind that, in an industry with such small print-runs but a constrained retail
price, ‘commercial’ means low-cost production). 56

¶46 Once the output from the noise reduction stage is saved, which at the moment is
likely to be on computer disc, a transfer should have been achieved that meets modern
expectations as closely as can be managed, given the nature of the original. But, as
we’ve seen, it will differ from the original in many respects. Further editing may be
done, usually on computer, in order to improve it, removing the noise of the stylus
hitting and leaving the disc (‘topping and tailing’) and fading in and out the background
noise at the beginning and end, for example; or perhaps more radical intervention.
Speed/pitch can be corrected at this stage, digitally, if that seems more practical than at
the turntable.

¶47 Remember, too, that we still have just one side of one disc to deal with. If the
performance being transferred was originally spread over several sides, a further
editorial task lies ahead as the separate sides get edited together into an apparently
continuous performance, which may require not just the joining of the sides but also the
editing of background noise and pitch levels where, as often happens, these are not
consistent across the side-change. This, of course, is a major misrepresentation of the
original source material, but one that seems to be regarded as absolutely essential by
record companies and consumers. One might have thought that there would be a strong
case to be made for issuing 78rpm discs as a sequence of separate sides, exactly as they
were originally published. At least, unlike the original users, we wouldn’t have to get up
and turn over the disc after each side had played. But clearly this is a minority view, and
so one of the essential tasks of the transfer engineer is to stitch those sides together.
What this involves depends on what happens at the side ends. As we’ve seen, musicians
tended to slow down for the last few beats to make an artistic close; sometimes
cadences were inserted, as in Sound File 7 (wav file), which collects the side breaks in
the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto as recorded on HMV with Alfred
Cortot and the LPO conducted by Landon Ronald in 1934. 57 In such cases the transfer
engineer has to cut the cadences out and join together the last chord that’s in the score
with the beginning of the next side, provided that the result is a fair representation of the
composition. If it’s not, or if, as occasionally happens, there is a gap in what was
recorded, it may be necessary to supply the missing notes from another performance of
the same piece. With the ritardando it is usually possible to join the sides without
further editing, simply because the original musicians did their best to place side ends at
cadences, and slowing down for cadences is musically acceptable anyway, even
expected. Nevertheless, the slowing for a side end is very often greater than for a
cadence, and consequently much larger ritardandi are present in the artificially
continuous performance made by the editor than the musicians would ever have made in
those same places in a concert. Equally, editors can cut them short by cross-fades.
Students of tempo variation in early recorded performance can easily be misled. 58

¶48 Comparison of different transfers of the same recordings—of which there are now
many instances easily available—shows at once just how much difference the transfer
engineer makes. Speeds/pitches, tone colour, background noise, side-end joins can all
be significantly different, and none need represent at all closely the sound of the 78s
played on original equipment. 59 Sometimes they will sound better. Modern equipment
can extract sonic information from the grooves that was possible to record but
impossible to reproduce via early record players. Sometimes, though, that can be a
disadvantage, as in the case of cold wax chatter, noise at ca. 10kHz produced by
vibration from the cutting machine in wax that was cooling too fast, and which therefore
tends to occur towards the end of a side cut in a cold studio, for example in Winter.
Cold wax chatter wasn’t audible on their equipment because it’s above the frequency
limit of gramophones, but it is audible on ours. However one looks at the issues, then,
it’s never going to be possible to say, for any transfer, that one has achieved the original
recorded sound. One can’t even say what that is, let alone know that one has recovered
it.

¶49 How much does this matter for our purposes? It depends on what we are trying to
say about the performances. If we’re studying tempo change, as we’ve just seen, it can
matter a lot at certain moments. The same goes for studies of instrumental or vocal tone
colour, which are essential to any work on changing ways of using instruments, or any
work on individual voices. The ways transfers are made can have a marked effect on the
detail with which instruments can be distinguished in larger ensembles. Textures can
sound clearer or more muddled not because of things the conductor and players did but
because of choices made by the modern transfer engineer. Parts of the music—
individual notes, longer sequences, or even whole sides—can have been edited-in from
other performances. So, while CD reissues can be extremely helpful for identifying
those things we want to study more closely, and (given enough data) can support
conclusions about performance style with widespread validity, any really detailed work
on an individual performance can only be properly founded when we have gone back to
an original disc and have played it ourselves, with various choices of equipment and
settings. Our situation is not unlike that facing the musicologist who wishes to comment
in detail on a piece of medieval or renaissance music. One can rely on modern editions,
or one can go back to the original manuscripts and prints, check, and make up one’s
own mind. Except that modern editions come with critical commentaries telling us what
the editor has done and CD reissues don’t, or only, tucked into a paragraph at the end of
the booklet, in the most general terms.

¶50 Equally, just as the editor of a manuscript may be exceptionally knowledgeable, far
more so than the user, so a really good transfer engineer—a Roger Beardsley, a Ward
Marston, a Mark Obert-Thorn—may be far better able than most academics to make the
best judgements about speeds and equalisation. Not all modern transfers are that good,
but in cases like these it can sometimes be appropriate to value the best CD reissues as
highly as the original disc. 60 It depends very much on the kind of work one wishes to
do. In the end, though, it’s impossible to know what to think unless one is in a position
to hear what has been done. And that ideally means comparing any reissue one may
wish to use with a copy of the disc, played in various ways in a well-equipped studio.
Responsible work with early recordings, then, involves getting to know where to find
the original discs, what can be learned from them, and how. Only then can one know
whether the research one wants to do with recordings can safely make do with CD
transfers or not.

¶51 So far I’ve talked about the musical information on a disc, and what happens to it
when we try to recover it. But there is written information there too, and that can also be
useful.

3.3. Discs and discography

Plate 5: HMV B 2686, matrix Bb12053, label

¶52 Plate 5 shows a typical label from a 78rpm disc. The background colour is a reddish
brown, known at the time as plum, and the writing is in gold. These were the colours
designating The Gramophone Company’s B Series 10-inch discs, about nine thousand
of which were issued between 1912 and 1958. 61 The Gramophone Co. used complex
but logical schemes of numbering for its discs and series, reflecting content and country
of origin. Series B contained mixed repertoire, tending towards the popular, or what we
might now call light music or easy listening, but with a sprinkling of popular classics,
mainly vocal or solo piano.

¶53 The company name is printed around the edge at the bottom: ‘Record manufactured
by THE GRAMOPHONE CO., LTD., Hayes, Middlesex, England.’ At the top is the
tradename ‘His Master’s Voice’ above the trademark, the painting by Francis Barraud
of his dog, Nipper, listening to a gramophone record (originally an Edison phonograph
but painted over in 1899 with one of the recent Improved Gramophones). 62 Across the
centre of the label is the title of the item on this side—in this case, two items, since both
were short enough to be fitted onto one side: ‘(a) WHITHER (b) HARK! HARK! THE
LARK’. On the next line comes the composer’s name in smaller type and in brackets,
‘(SCHUBERT)’; then the singer’s name in larger type, ‘JOHN GOSS’; and beneath that
the details of the accompaniment: ‘with Piano accomp. by Kathleen Markwell’. Next,
on the left, comes the voice type, ‘BARITONE’; language, ‘In English’; and
accompaniment again, ‘with Piano’ (this to help record shops file it correctly). Beneath
this is the identifying number for this side of the disc, ‘(6-2939)’ which was habitually
used within the company for identification purposes. In the centre at this level is a
pasted-on stamp indicating the appropriate purchase tax for this type of disc. 63 To the
right is the recommended playback speed, ‘SPEED 78’ (which may or may not be
correct); and beneath that the catalogue number of the disc as a whole (embracing both
sides), ‘Cat. No. / B / 2686’. This is the number by which the disc will generally be
identified today in writing and discussion, and is properly called the coupling number
(though more commonly these days the catalogue number), since it covers the coupling
of the items on the two sides of the disc, one with the other. (The same performance
could be issued in another series with a different coupling, in other words with a
different item on the other side of the disc.)

¶54 Further and for specialists more interesting information is stamped into the shellac
around the label. This is the identification data engraved into the metal stamper and
reproduced inevitably thereafter. At the top is the company number for this side, ‘6-
2939’; to the left is a ‘1’, the number of the positive from which the stamper was made;
and to the right a ‘G’, which numbers the stamper. Gramophone Co. stampers were
identified, in order of use, G R A M O P H L T D. (Popular records might go round the
clock more than once, in which case the letters were understood as numbers 1-9 and 0,
hence GD would be 10, GG 11, and so on.)

¶55 Most important of all is the matrix number at the bottom, since it is this alone that
indicates, by uniquely identifying the wax master, the particular performance carried by
this disc: Bb12053I . Bb was a series of matrix numbers that the Gramophone Co. used
from 1921 to 1930 for recordings made in the London area for Head Office at Hayes. 64
Thanks to the research of Alan Kelly in the EMI Archive, working from company
documents, we know that 12053, and 12054 on the other side of the disc, come within a
sub-series recorded between November 1927 and January 1928 in the C studio of the
Small Queen’s Hall, London; these two sides were both recorded on the 24 November
1927.

¶56 The matrix number up to this point identifies the recording event: this pair of pieces
recorded in one session. But a session could (usually did) include more than one
attempt, or take. First there would generally be a trial (unnumbered), whose wax record
would be played in order to check on sound and performance quality, and by being
played, since it was only wax, would be destroyed. Only then were takes made for
potential publication. As many were made as it took to get two acceptable performances
(one for issue and one as a reserve in case of production problems). Each was numbered
in sequence, and the number, as an uppercase Roman numeral, was stamped superscript
immediately after the main matrix number, and before the triangle (the delta symbol)
which indicates the electrical recording process used (here the Western Electric system).
In this case the take number is a ‘I’, so it’s the first take, although Kelly’s research in
the company archives reveals that three takes were made for each side of B2686. 65
While take numbers are occasionally found in double figures, and numbers up to four
are not uncommon, most published takes are numbered I or II. It’s true that at this stage
in the history of sound recording, before editing had become possible and perfection
had become the expectation, performers and engineers, and indeed consumers, were
content to accept small blemishes in a performance provided that the performance as a
whole was engaging; and so an adequate result on the first or second attempt was not as
surprising as it might seem today. But equally, we need to bear in mind that when major
performer mistakes occurred, or if there was a visible technical problem, recording
would stop and the wax would be set aside for recycling without a take number ever
being allotted to it. The numbered takes in the company archives and on the discs,
therefore, are those that were not obviously unusable; and so I and II may not
necessarily be the first and second attempts.

¶57 In the case of expensive recordings involving, for instance, a symphony orchestra
with vocal soloists, it was customary to record each take on two or even three sets of
equipment in order to be sure of a technically acceptable take, and in that case the
simultaneously recorded wax matrices will be stamped with the same matrix and take
numbers, but with the addition of a letter after the take number indicating which set of
additional equipment was used. Frequently the lathes were simply fed with the same
signal, but sometimes, especially later on, different sets of microphones would each
have their own lathe, which provides us potentially (if the metals survive) with, in
effect, a different recording. Whichever produced the best sound was chosen for issue.
Thus Albert Coates conducting Beethoven’s 9th Symphony merited two sets of
equipment for the first three movements and the beginning of the fourth (CR759 to
CR769), but three sets for the sides with vocal soloists and chorus (CR778 to CR782).

¶58 I’ve gone through this trainspotter’s trip to heaven mainly for the sake of the take
number, for although it is of course important to understand all the information printed
on a disc it’s the take number that, for anyone studying performances, is potentially
really interesting. In order to understand why, we need to go back to the manufacturing
process described earlier. You’ll recall that as the stampers were used over and over to
print discs in soft shellac they gradually deteriorated. While fresh stampers could be
grown from the original metal positive, this was not a problem. But where this was no
longer possible through damage to the master, either accidental or from over-use, a
decision then had to be made whether or not to keep the title in the catalogue. If it was
decided to continue supplying it there was a choice: to remake the recording using the
same performers or to attempt to make a transfer from a standard pressing. The latter
was more cost effective and so was generally the route taken. A famous exception
concerns the legendary ‘Hear my prayer’ sung by Ernest Lough with the Temple
Church choir (HMV C1329). The original best seller, and we are talking of a million
copies, was made in April 1927. By the end of the year it was obvious that the original
masters could no longer be used to make satisfactory stampers. Thus in April 1928 both
sides were re-recorded: the same matrix numbers were allocated, but with incremented
take numbers, presumably to allow even experts to assume that they came from the
original sessions. That later recording remained on sale as a 78 until the demise of the
format in the early 1960s. 66 For students of performance instances such as this are, of
course, fascinating, because they give us the possibility of comparing two or more
performances made by the same performers in the same (and in this case even in a
different) session.

¶59 The difficulty, as ever, is finding copies of the different takes. B2686, the John
Goss disc, is listed in the company archives as having been issued only in this take;
confusingly the discography of HMV Series B published by Andrews & Bayly in 2000,
67
gives the take number for this side as -2, which may be a typo or may indicate that
they (or their source) had seen a disc with a different take number. These sorts of
discrepancies can be tantalising, but on the whole most of us have better things to do
than to research them. However, where different takes are easily available, or enough
research has already been done, comparisons can be well worthwhile: we shall make
some in chapter 8.

¶60 The alternative solution to the problem of worn out stampers was to make a
transfer, as mentioned above. In acoustic days this was achieved by connecting the
replay stylus directly to a cutting stylus, which worked surprisingly well: many copies
of Adelina Patti’s are mechanical dubs, identified by the lack of her signature in the
wax. Caruso was another whose records were popular enough to have had to be re-
mastered in this way (identified by an ‘S’ over ‘8’ symbol). 68 With the introduction of
electrical recording and replay, transfers became much simpler. A pressing was played
with an electrical pickup and the signal fed to a cutting-lathe as the source rather than
the usual microphone. Transfers done this way became quite common, and by 1930
were generally very successful.

¶61 Apart from the need to replace worn-out masters, transfers were frequently made to
alter the sonic nature of the record, especially to enable it to pass the wear test. This
required that a record should last at least 50 playings. Electrical recording placed great
strains on acoustic replay equipment, and over-loud records would be chewed up within
a few playings. Reducing the overall volume or just cutting bass could enable a record
to pass the wear test. 69 Other reasons were not uncommon. Sometimes one sees in the
recording sheets notes such as ‘transferred to increase volume of oboe solo at 1’43”’.
Up until 1931, transfers were marked with a ‘T’ in the matrix number. 70 Later, a
common indicator became an increase in the take number. Many of Gigli’s popular
records show, say, a ‘take 3’ when only two were originally made, leading unwary
collectors to mistaken ‘discoveries’. On other occasions a fresh matrix number would be
allocated. 71 Victor electrical transfers are more difficult to spot and may be less
common. However a small ‘R’ next to the take number is a definite indicator. Before its
merger with HMV, Columbia would usually add an ‘R’ to the catalogue number but this
indicates an electrical re-make of an acoustic recording, and not a transfer.

¶62 All these are sources of potential confusion to students of the performances, and
emphasise how necessary it is to have a good understanding of record company
procedures in order to see why performances with identical catalogue and matrix
numbers may be different, and vice versa.

¶63 In the very early days, before moulding cylinders was possible, multiple copies
were made right away by feeding the sound through numerous tubes to a bank of
cylinder recorders. If more were needed, though, there was no alternative to getting the
artists back into the studio and recording again. For this reason, what appear to be
several copies of the same original may in fact preserve different performances, and it is
therefore always worth listening to every copy of an early cylinder. Here, too, dubbing
was common. 72

¶64 It is also worth being aware of the ways in which the same performance could
appear in more than one series, so that the same side number could appear with different
couplings and therefore with different coupling numbers. The Gramophone Co., in
particular, tended, in the case of popular discs, to issue one performance in several
series for different international markets. For example, the Albert Coates Beethoven 9
mentioned above was issued by the Gramophone Co. in six different series—4-, D, AB,
AW, EJ and ES—while a further matrix, made using one of the other sets of equipment
(not always the same set, and sometimes both), was sent to the USA for issue by the
Victor company, with whom the Gramophone Co. had a very long-standing
arrangement to exchange recordings for sale in one another’s territories. All these
publish the same takes, so that if you can’t find a decent copy in one series, one may
still be found in an archive under one of the other catalogue numbers. The exchange
agreement with Victor, of course, resulted in the same performances being issued not
just with different catalogue numbers but under the names of different companies.

¶65 A final common cause of multiple issues was the habit of reordering the sequence
of sides in a multi-disc set so that the discs could be played in sequence by an auto-
changer. This was a mechanism built into later gramophones that allowed the user to put
a pile of discs on the machine, and have the machine play them in turn, minimising the
inconvenience of having to change sides. Thus for a 4-disc set (a convenient quantity
for a nineteenth-century symphony) the sides would be paired 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5; the
machine would play sides 1-4, the user would turn the pile of discs over as one, and the
machine would play sides 5-8. These reorderings would be reissued with a separate set
of coupling numbers, usually in a separate part of the numerical series. Thus HMV
Series DB reserved numbers in the 7000s for autocouplings (the main beneficiaries at
first being Gilbert and Sullivan operettas previously issued in the 3000s). Again, this
offers us the opportunity to find further copies of discs in which we may be interested.

¶66 None of this information can be translated directly into dates, though much of it can
be extremely helpful if enough interlocking information is available. Numbers were
generally allocated in sequence (though sometimes in blocks), so if one has a date for
some matrices in a series it will often be possible to narrow down the dates on which
others were recorded. For the main labels much of the research has already been done in
the surviving paper archives, and a good discography will be able to provide dates not
only for the recording of each take but also the dates of issue and deletion from the sales
catalogue. 73

¶67 As with any kind of research or collecting (which is psychologically much the same
thing), details can be assembled because they are useful or because they are there. And
it can sometimes seem, when one goes through the kinds of information that can be
recovered about early recording, as if much of the data discussed is of the latter sort. I
can only emphasise, as a musician with a very limited interest in technology, that all the
information I’ve detailed here can make a difference to the kinds of things we can
sensibly say about performances on record. And that’s why we need access to them, and
why we have so much to learn from professional discographers. If you don’t understand
how your sources were made you’ve much less chance of understanding the sounds they
transmit.

¶68 At this point some advice on using published discographies would be appropriate,
but in fact it’s been so well covered recently in Simon Trezise’s chapter for the
Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music that I can do no better than recommend
readers who need guidance to begin there. 74

3.4. Piano rolls

¶69 There is another early recording technology we need to know about; in fact, in this
case it’s even more essential, because if we don’t know how piano rolls are made we’ve
no hope at all of knowing what to make of the performances they encode.

¶70 The first thing to understand is that there are two crucially different types of player
piano and music roll, those that encode information about dynamics and rubato and
those that don’t. The first type play on what are now known generically as reproducing
pianos, and second type on player pianos, the latter being the foot-operated ‘pianolas’
more commonly found today. All types are operated by suction, generated at the pianola
by the player pumping two large pedals, in the reproducing piano by an electrically
driven pump. In both types the piano action is played by a series of small pneumatic
motors or bellows, one for each note. The mechanism is controlled by a roll of paper,
usually 11¼ inches (28.6cm) wide, and it is these rolls that, by one means or another,
encode the original performance.

¶71 Rolls for pianolas were not, strictly speaking, recorded at all. They encode only
pitch and duration, which was notated by hand, copying from a score. Expressivity had
to be supplied by the operator at playback stage, and this was done by using the pedals
to control dynamics and accents and a system of hand levers in the keywell which
allowed the performer (a word that under the circumstances seems fair) to modify the
playback speed continuously during the playing of the roll and thus to generate phrasing
and rubato. The sustaining and una corda pedals were controlled by two further hand
levers. Without any intervention by a performer, pianola rolls produced sounds hardly
more musical than a modern MIDI encoding of pitch and duration. 75 (I say ‘hardly
more’ rather than ‘no more’ because the irregularities in the live piano provide, albeit
accidentally, a semblance of musical shaping that a computer does not.) But with the
participation of an experienced player a pianola can produce miraculous results. What is
so fascinating about it from our point of view is that, uniquely among musical
instruments, the pianola separates out ‘getting round the notes’ from ‘musicality’. The
machine takes care of the right notes, leaving the performer to do everything that makes
a performance expressively musical, or not. It is thus, potentially (though as yet this
potential seems entirely unrealised), an extraordinarily valuable teaching tool. In a
totally different way from the reproducing piano, therefore, the pianola offers
fascinating possibilities for students of performance style and musicianship. Every
teaching and research institution should have one.

¶72 In the case of reproducing pianos, the pianist played as normal, and what he (rarely
she) played was more or less automatically (according to the system) marked in ink
onto a roll by the recording mechanism, assisted by an operator, the extent of whose
musical (as opposed to technical) contribution remains unclear. Later, the inked roll
could be edited to remove imperfections in the performance or the recording, then
converted by hand to a perforated roll, which in turn, and having been checked by the
original pianist, was reproduced by machine in multiple copies for sale. The mention of
editing should already be raising concerns. More will appear as we look further into the
details. Nevertheless, reproducing piano rolls encode enough of performances and
pianists we have no other means of hearing to make perseverance worthwhile.

¶73 There are three main systems of reproducing piano, the Welte, the Duo-Art and the
Ampico. I don’t propose to go into the differences here, 76 although it’s important to
understand that none will play rolls made for another, and each—rather as with the
record companies—aimed to build up their own roster of pianists who would record
exclusively with them. Most owners bought only one instrument (and incidentally a
huge number did so), and so were restricted to the rolls designed for it. Each system
built up a catalogue of several thousand rolls during the 30 years or so in which
reproducing pianos were made; it is estimated that about 20,000 rolls of classical and
light music were made in all, and perhaps a similar quantity carrying popular music. 77
The Welte-Mignon was the first, introduced in 1904. In 1912 the Ampico system
appeared, continuing to be developed until the end of the era in the 1930s. 78 And in
1914 the Aeolian Company in America introduced its Duo-Art system.

¶74 What can we learn from reproducing piano rolls? While the original pianist’s tempo
was encoded inevitably by the length of the perforations, there remains more doubt as to
the role of the assistant in fixing the values of other parameters. Editing after the fact
clearly had little bearing on what was actually played first of all, except in so far as
editor or pianist could remember or re-imagine. Moreover, the mechanisms were
hamstrung in their ability to reproduce dynamics precisely both by their ability to
distinguish only two dynamic levels at once, one for the lower notes and one for the
upper, and by the modest number of dynamic levels that the suction mechanism was
capable of differentiating. 79

¶75 When we listen to a recording of a piano roll we are of course several stages further
removed from the original sound. First of all, the instrument has to be in perfect
working order. Few specialists exist who have recovered the skills to restore them
adequately, and not all modern recordings use well-prepared instruments. Another
approach, rather than to restore the piano with a built-in mechanism, is to use a ‘push-
up’ or ‘Vorsetzer’, in which the roll mechanism operates levers (‘fingers’ in the trade)
which, when placed in front of a piano, play the keys. In either case the sensitivity of
the result depends very much on the expertise of the restorer, particularly so since in the
case of Welte as many details of the original recording equipment as possible were kept
secret and thus much modern knowledge has been acquired by trial and error, the results
shaped by modern expectations. Secondly there is the question of the piano itself. Any
performance at a piano, and most of all performances by the finest pianists of the sort
who recorded on rolls, has its details determined by the way that particular instrument
sounds. If you replace the instrument with another it’s inevitable that some of those
details, on which the expressivity of the performance depended, will no longer work in
the same way. 80 Consequently, piano rolls are not necessarily best reproduced on the
finest modern pianos; and whatever piano is used, it is never going to give the results
heard in the recording studio. The huge benefits of recording rolls on modern pianos—
that here we seem to have early twentieth-century pianists playing as if in a modern hall
with modern sound reproduction—are illusory, therefore. It sounds as if Rachmaninov
is present, but he’s not.

¶76 A comparison of a reproducing piano roll and a performance by the same artist
recorded on disc will give us some help in putting all these points into perspective. Of
course it’s not the same performance, but it’s the best we can do to assess what piano
rolls can and can’t pass on. Sound Files 8 (wav file) and 9 (wav file) contain extracts
from recordings of Grieg playing his own Norwegian Bridal Procession Op. 19 no. 2,
and Sound Files 10 (wav file) and 11 (wav file) extracts from Raoul Pugno playing
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 11. The first of each pair is a Welte roll transferred by
Denis Hall, whose reproducing pianos are probably as carefully restored and maintained
as any today; the second in each case is a transfer from a Gramophone & Typewriter
Co. 78rpm disc. 81 Both discs were recorded in 1903, the Pugno roll was made in 1905,
the Grieg in 1906, so neither disc is exactly contemporaneous with the corresponding
roll. In general terms the performances within each pair are very similar; only a few
details differ. Grieg on disc tends to accent the second beat of the bar in the opening
theme, whereas his roll does not. He may have changed his approach, although it would
be quite a significant change to make to the principal theme in a character piece; or it
may be that the assistant normalised what he perceived as an irregular accentuation.
With this roll a further comparison is possible, because a playing of it was also recorded
on an Odeon disc using a Welte piano in 1930, in other words at a time when
technicians trained in maintaining the instruments were still available. According to
Eliot Levin, ‘As Welte-trained service engineers were still working then, there is every
reason to suppose that these transfers were made in optimum conditions; the Odeon
people would have made certain of that. There is every reason to believe that the venue
was Welte’s own studio, and that the master-rolls themselves, rather than duplicated
rolls, were used. So although as an elderly gramophone record, the sound may not be
wonderful, I do believe that we are hearing a roll in optimum circumstances.’ 82 It would
be reassuring to have some firmer evidence. Certainly the speeds and therefore the
timings are significantly different from Hall’s, probably due to a combination of
different roll and turntable speeds, and there is a pitch difference between the 1930 roll
and the other two recordings. Despite Levin’s belief, the 1930 Welte seems to articulate
less clearly than either Grieg on disc or the modern-maintained instrument, 83 and there
are tiny differences in relative loudness in which the Hall recording seems slightly more
subtle, all tending to cast doubt on how ideally the 1930 Welte had been set up.
Advocates of the reproducing piano will find much to discuss here. But for us, much the
most significant point is that neither playing of the roll can match the subtleties of
Grieg’s rubato and dynamics. They are good, but not good enough.

¶77 The same story is told by Pugno’s Liszt performances, particularly interesting in
those passages that imitate cimbalom playing, involving very fast repeated chords.
Compared to the disc, the roll’s performance is notably even in its dynamics, and as a
result seems slightly artificial; this is even more the case at the end of the piece where
the roll is unable to emphasise the melody notes that appear from time to time at the top
of the repeating chords. Pugno’s performance on disc, although the sound is terrible and
the texture, as a result, is a complete mess, sounds plausibly musical in a way that the
roll does not. That said, for pianists not recorded at all on disc, transfers of rolls as good
as Hall’s are well able to tell us about general style. We must just be careful not to draw
any conclusions from their details. 84

¶78 Others transfers are less satisfactory, and so it’s clear that the way the instruments
are restored and set up for performance is crucial. Comparing two recordings of Duo-
Art 6566, which encodes Paderewski playing Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 24 no. 4 in
November 1922, recorded with different pianos, one played by a push-up, the other with
the mechanism built-in, maintained by different specialists, and recorded in different
acoustics, a host of details in the performances we hear are significantly different. One,
on the Nimbus label, takes eight seconds longer than the other, on Aeolia; 85 although it
speeds up at first, the Nimbus roll then starts to slow, and falls fairly consistently behind
thereafter, though not at an entirely regular rate. Or if you prefer Aeolia moves ahead:
it’s impossible to know. 86 As far as the sound goes, Nimbus’s modern Steinway, played
by a push-up (in Nimbus terminology, a robot) is much brighter and more clangourous
than Aeolia’s 1926 Steinway Duo-Art, and as a result the details of timing from note to
note produce quite dramatically different effects. Many of the things one might say
about the pianist’s response to the score at any specific moment would be different if
one used the other recording.

¶79 There is no doubt that, carefully played on a well-restored piano, a reproducing

piano roll is capable of producing remarkably lifelike results, considering the limitations
of the process. But there is no way of knowing which details one hears faithfully
reproduce what the pianist played. Consequently, for detailed work they cannot be
relied upon. That said, we can still learn things from them that transform our
understanding of a piece. The classic example, much discussed in recent years, is the
Welte roll recorded by Debussy on 1 November 1913 of his Prélude ‘La cathédrale
engloutie’, on which he doubles the speed for each passage notated in minim chords,
and halves it again when the notation returns to crotchets. 87 The minim = crotchet is not
indicated in the score, and the roll is thus the only evidence of Debussy’s intention, but
the difference is so radical (and so much an improvement) as to be impossible to set
aside as a momentary whim. Consequently the new Debussy edition includes the
requisite indications of speed change, 88 and the very many recordings made by other
artists between Debussy and modern times, which play with a notionally constant beat,
are now considered to be mistaken, even though they include recordings by pianists
otherwise considered as among the greatest Debussy interpreters. 89

¶80 No less extraordinary, I think, is the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K.
537 (the so-called Coronation concerto) on Welte 237, recorded by Carl Reinecke in
1905. Reinecke was born in 1824, somewhat after Mozart’s death, but before
Beethoven’s. He grew up absorbing, presumably, performance styles current in
Denmark in the later 1830s and early 40s. How much of that was still present in his
playing in 1905 is impossible to say. As we shall see in chapter 7, 90 while a majority of
artists seem to play broadly consistently throughout their careers, albeit absorbing
something of current trends as they pass, some change more fully in line with changing
tastes. We can’t know where Reinecke lay along that spectrum. But with all those
provisos, his Mozart playing is truly astonishing, and utterly unlike anything we have
ever imagined in modern times of historical Mozartian playing, but also—
significantly—much more radically expressive and more highly decorated than any
other Mozart piano playing on early recordings. By all the standards we have become
used to, whether in modern or early recorded playing, it is exceptional, and thus of the
greatest interest. A sample is given in Sound File 12 (wav file). 91

¶81 Before leaving pre-Second World War recording it is important to mention the
beginnings of radio. Particularly relevant to us is broadcasting policy of the BBC which
from 1922 aimed to raise musical taste by broadcasting what its Music Department
considered the best music both old and new. 92 Music was broadcast either live—and in
due course enough was required to sustain a national BBC Symphony Orchestra as well
as several regional orchestras—or from records which were bought in multiple copies
by the BBC Gramophone Library and sent out to regional stations for broadcast. 93 Very
little recording, however, was done by the BBC until the outbreak of war, when
recording broadcasts onto acetate discs became much more useful. Recording as a
matter of course, however, began only with the introduction of tape recorders into
programme production in the early 1950s.

3.5. LPs

¶82 We have cinema and the Second World War to thank for the long-playing 33 rpm
disc, which was to be the standard format for recorded sound from the late 1940s until
the introduction of the digital compact disc in 1982. 94 Sound tracks for films,
introduced in the late 1920s, could either be printed on the film or on a separate disc to
be played simultaneously with the film projection. In order to make a shellac disc run
for the same amount of time as a 1000-foot reel of film—about eleven minutes—the
disc had to be run at 33 rpm. Adapting this format for recorded music, however, posed
several new problems. While techniques were gradually introduced for assembling film
sound tracks from several smaller recordings, musical performances aimed at record
buyers needed to be continuous, the sound quality needed to be good—and for both
reasons dubbing from smaller takes was not suitable—and performers had to be able to
make acceptable takes that were between two and three times as long as for a 78rpm
disc. Consequently, although there were attempts at introducing long-playing discs early
in the 1930s, they were not especially successful.

¶83 At the same time, in the later 1920s, recording machines began to be developed that
stored sound on magnetic wire instead of on wax and shellac discs. The wire was fed
from a reel through the machine to a take-up spool. Electrical signals from a
microphone fed an electromagnet (the recording head) that magnetised the wire in
proportion and frequency to the original signal as the wire passed by the head. Running
the recorded wire through the machine allowed the sound to be played back via an
amplifier and loudspeaker. The wire could be stored and played, or reused many times;
it provided a longer running time than conventional discs; and if necessary it could be
edited by cutting and soldering the wire, removing unsatisfactory material and soldering
in something better. The main disadvantages were that the wire tended to break, with
potentially dangerous consequences for the operator; wire and tape recordings were far
more expensive and time-consuming to duplicate on a mass scale than discs, and on
wire the sound quality was no better.

¶84 Magnetic recording improved, though, with the invention in Germany in the early
1930s of magnetic tape, which was safer than wire to operate (though more flammable)
and easier to edit. During the Second World War, recognising the propaganda value of
continuous recording and almost instant replay, work continued on improving the
system, and German scientists developed a technique for storing a much wider range of
frequencies on tape. When the Allies requisitioned German radio stations in 1945 tape
recording was found to have advanced way beyond pre-War capabilities. Among the
material recovered by the Russians were tape recordings in stereo, a few surviving
examples of which resurfaced in the 1990s including an astonishingly clear recording of
Bruckner’s 8th Symphony under Karajan recorded in Berlin in 1944, which, although it
lacks the first movement, is well worth searching out. 95 Compared to performances on
contemporary 78rpm disc it is truly remarkable. 96

¶85 Another product of war work, this time in Britain and the USA, was the ability to
store a much wider range of frequencies—up to 14,000Hz—on disc, useful for a variety
of secret purposes including anti-submarine warfare. Decca was at the forefront of this
work, culminating in its ‘Full Frequency Range Recording’ (ffrr) system,
enthusiastically promoted over the following decades. So by the time the recording
industry began to recover after the War all the technology was available to produce
long-playing discs with a much better frequency response, carrying recordings that had
been edited to give the cleanest possible performance. The consequences for anyone
studying performances on record are very far-reaching. Once it was possible to edit
easily, by cutting and splicing magnetic tape, it was possible to record in takes of any
length. Because the tape ran, typically, at 30 inches per second, cutting out a few inches
of tape would remove tiny blemishes; sounds fractions of a second long could be
spliced in from another take; or much longer passages could be replaced. The end result
could be a tape made up of fragments of many separate performances, assembled by an
editor into what sounded like a coherent whole. With the introduction of tape, then, we
see the end of live performance on record, save for special occasions marketed as ‘live
recordings’. From this point on, records aimed to transmit something more perfect than
a live performance, more perfect than any performer could achieve in one unedited
take—more perfect, and yet less real. 97 Everything we say about performances from
now on has to be said with that in mind. We’ll return to this question a little later in
order to try to decide how much it matters.

¶86 The final piece in the technological jigsaw was the introduction in 1948 by
Columbia of the microgroove 33 rpm record. Pressed in vinyl instead of shellac, and
with its grooves smaller and closer together than the 78, the microgroove disc could
carry 23 minutes of music, which was enough for all but the very longest symphony
movements or continuously running operatic acts. RCA Victor responded almost
immediately by introducing the 45rpm ‘single’, a seven-inch disc containing the 4½
minutes or so that had, through the 78, standardised the duration of popular music titles.
It was on singles that most pop music sold throughout the glory days of rock ’n’ roll; it
was probably the most influential medium for the dissemination of popular culture ever
invented. 78s continued to be produced, in parallel with LPs and singles, especially in
Britain and the Commonwealth countries, right through the 1950s and into the early
60s, but were bought in declining quantities and only by those unwilling or, beyond the
developed nations, unable to invest in new playback equipment.

¶87 Stereo sound on disc and tape was introduced commercially quite soon after the LP.
Again, experiments from before the War were taken up afterwards, leading in due
course to multi-track tape, in which several tracks were recorded in parallel along the
same length of magnetic tape. Two tracks, of course, were all that were required for
stereo, but the same principle, allied to wider tape in order not to compromise sound
quality, was extended to four, eight and sixteen tracks in order to allow performances to
be assembled a part at a time. The balance between the parts could easily be adjusted
later in the studio before the whole was mixed down to two tracks for cutting to a
master disc, one channel on each side of the groove. It would be a mistake to think of
multi-tracking as a technique used only for popular music. While it is true that it
became (and remains) the standard way of assembling performances in popular music,
so much so that live performances are often difficult to bring off with the same success,
98
in classical music, too, multi-tracking gradually replaced mixing straight to stereo.
Even without multi-tracking, though, radical manipulation of balance became possible
early on. Sometimes the results are intentionally audible, as in the famous Decca Ring
cycle in which the producer, John Culshaw, mixed sound effects with the instrumental
and vocal performance in a virtuoso display of studio technique. 99 Most of the time,
though, we as listeners are quite unaware, unless very familiar indeed with the sound of
these same pieces in concert, of just how much has been changed in the arrangement of
instruments and voices in the so-called sonic stage. The term itself is revealing, for it’s
clearly not supposed to be the same as the concert stage. In the same way the title of
Culshaw’s book about that recording, Ring Resounding, with its pun on re-sounding,
celebrates the remaking of Wagner’s score into something for the imagination rather
than for the theatre. From now on, then, we can no longer trust the balance of
instruments on a disc as a faithful representation of the balance heard in the studio.
Soloists could be brought forward, other groups pushed back, in order to make a
performance that balanced the materials in the score in a new way. I put it like this to
stress that while the results may not have been natural, in the old sense, they were not
necessarily unmusical. And the fact that we find recordings made this way musically
satisfying, often gripping, is one with which we shall have to engage later on.
Artificiality in the making of a performance doesn’t necessarily produce a less
satisfactory musical experience. On the contrary, for most people the results are
preferable.

¶88 By quite early in the 1950s, then, what people heard from record players was
radically different from what was heard before. Measured by sound quality it appeared
to be far more lifelike that anything that came off 78s and cylinders. Yet older listeners
continued to prize their 78s, and critics continued to refer back nostalgically to
performers long gone. Although in the 70s and 80s one heard less of that, especially
once CD made 12-inch discs and their playback equipment seem awkward, and 78s fit
only for the dump, the torrent of reissues in recent years had unquestionably
reawakened the sense that there is a directness of communication through early
recordings that was later lost. There seems little reason to doubt that editing is what
makes the difference. But is it because an edited performance sounds unnatural, or is it
rather because of what editing did to the way musicians thought about performing?
We’ll return to this later, but for now it is worth bearing in mind, as we look briefly at
digital sound, how the increasing perfection of sound reproduction, coupled with
increasing expectations of critics and record buyers, has encouraged musicians to focus
much more attention on being accurate and on being typical than on being innovative or
on being moving.

3.6. Digital sound

¶89 Digital recording was available to professionals from the late 1960s, and during the
70s record companies gradually changed over to digital tape. Combined with Direct
Metal Mastering (in which the recording lathe cut straight into metal, instead of into
lacquer followed by electroplating) digital recording produced very good sound from
the last generation of LPs. Indeed, it is useful to understand just how good LPs got
during the late 70s and early 80s, because the first CDs were not really very good at all.
While a huge amount of marketing hype was generated by the release of CDs and CD
players in early 1983, the really surprising thing about them at the time was not the
quality of the sound, which was grainy and unnatural, but rather the silence of the
background. Even the best analogue recordings included tape hiss, and even the best
vinyl discs generated surface noise. It was the absence of that that was so striking.

¶90 In principle digital sound is simple. The sound wave is sampled a large number of
times per second—44,100 for CD, more in some other formats—and the numbers are
used to record its shape. The sound is thus represented by a sequence of numbers which
can be stored in any format you like; at first it was on tape, later on computer. In order
to edit the sound one simply changes the numbers. There are snags, though. Because a
soundwave is curved and numbers are discrete, at the most detailed level the wave is
represented by steps and not a curve. The edges of the steps have to be smoothed out by
filtering. In among the numbers that encode the sound waves is a lot of complex coding
that records the position of the data within the file, information about track numbers,
and increasingly now information about the content, including titles, composers, and
other information that can be displayed during playback. There is really no sense, then,
in which a digital sound file is at all like an analogue recording on 78 or LP. But it has
two overwhelming advantages. It offers a very convincing representation of the original
sound, and (given a lot of very complex software) it is extraordinarily easy to edit. And
done carefully, digital editing is impossible to detect. It’s become normal, therefore, for
record producers to edit far more frequently than before. What this means is that it’s
reasonable to assume that most pages in a score that’s been recorded have at least one
edit in them; sometimes there are many. 100 Moreover, working in the digital domain,
and editing at a computer, it is remarkably easy to change any detail of a recording.
What was done for several decades with a razor blade and sticky tape, substituting slices
of the complete recording, has now been refined to the click of a mouse, operating on as
much or as little of the whole sound as one wants to alter, changing it in pitch, speed,
colour, amplitude, while juggling, overlapping and combining as many takes as one
needs to in order to get whatever result one desires. Clearly, CDs, for all their
apparently lifelike sound, do not carry performances in the sense in which performers
and audiences normally understand them, nor in the sense in which early recordings,
despite their compromised sound, preserve them from the past. But to what extent does
this matter?

¶91 Before we try to answer that, let’s look back over the technologies described here
and try to list their pros and cons as evidence for the sounds originally produced. 101

Cylinders and 78rpm discs (acoustic era)

• do preserve single unedited takes

• can transmit accurate relative timings and relative pitches (subject to speed
change during disc cutting)
• cannot transmit precise data on speeds or pitch
• cannot be used as sufficient evidence for the colour of a voice, still less an
 instrument, because they don’t transmit the higher frequencies that fully
determine it, and the recording equipment tends to alter the balance of those
frequencies that get through to the disc
• do not represent concert-practice scorings in instrumental music, nor concert
balances between instruments, nor venue acoustics

78rpm discs (electrical era) improve on acoustic era recordings in these respects:

• can transmit more information about colour

• do represent concert scorings, and are somewhat more likely to represent concert
balances, and are much better at representing recording venue acoustics

LPs and analogue tape

• do provide a relatively faithful representation of sound colour

• do provide reliable data on speeds and pitch
• because of tape editing cannot be relied upon to represent one continuous
performance
• do not consistently represent the balance of instruments/voices heard by a
listener at the recording session
• may or may not represent the balance of instruments/voices heard by a listener at
the recording session

Digitally recorded LPs, CDs and subsequent media

• may or may not provide a faithful representation of sound colour

• may or may not provide unaltered data on speeds and pitch
• are unlikely to represent one continuous performance for more than a few
seconds at a time

General notes

• ‘Live recordings’, whether on LP or later, may have been assembled from

recordings of several continuous performances
• LP or CD transfers from 78s may not represent faithfully the content of the
original discs.
• Digital ‘remasterings’ of analogue recordings may not faithfully represent the
sound of the original tapes.

3.7. Editing and its implications

¶92 With all these limitations in mind, and having a clearer idea, I hope, of what kinds
of documents recordings are, we can now turn to the key question for the study of
performance from recordings: is a recorded performance a useable substitute for a real
performance? This can be a philosophical question if we want it to be, and indeed
philosophers of music have examined it. We’ve already seen Godlovitch comparing
recordings to photographs, 102 and I suggested that film would have been a better,
though still flawed, analogy, for at least film uses events ordered in time so as to create
meaning. And as José Bowen has said, 103 we recognise that film is edited, and that
things happen as a result that could not be achieved in a single take, and we’re perfectly
happy with that. But film editing is not really very like music editing. Film editing is
more like performing—realising the script 104 —while editing musical recordings is
more a matter of tinkering with a performance (which may explain why film-making
has long been regarded as an art while recording is still generally considered a craft). 105
You can falsify a musical performance on record in a way that you can’t falsify the
acting of a film, because acting a film is never intended to be done in one take: illusion
is the whole aim. A better analogy is film of a theatre performance; but nobody does
that, because film can always make the same story more thrilling, since theatre implies
visual contexts, and film is much better at making those real: film replaces the theatre-
goer’s imagination. Fortunately, there isn’t an equivalent for listening to music (except
opera, and the singing gives film an impossible task in creating an illusion of reality).
So we can’t quite decide what recordings are by looking to film.

¶93 For Davies one of the most significant disadvantages of recordings is the thing that
for us makes them essential, their repeatability. 106 Live performances (performances at
which one is present) benefit from their unpredictability and their creativity; recorded
performances gradually lose those qualities the more one listens to them, and any quirks
eventually become annoying. (That belief, incidentally, which has done so much to
inhibit dangerous performance on record, may well be at least partly mistaken if
experience of early recordings is anything to go by. Davies quotes Alfred Brendel: ‘The
studio is ruled by the aesthetics of compulsive cleanliness’, which seems about the right
analogy. 107 ) Davies sees the perfection of studio recordings as compensation for the
lack of spontaneity, and concludes that studio recorded performances are not worse, but
simply different.[313]

¶94 Clearly, if one considers recordings from a production point of view, reconstructing
in one’s mind, as one listens, the studio and the procedures that made the performance,
then Davies is absolutely right. But do we listen to them that way? It’s possible to, and
if one were a record producer or sound engineer one very probably would, at least when
choosing to do so. But I don’t think many people do, and it’s certainly not what records
are made for. They’re made to sound like performances, and on the whole, most
especially when we’re engaged in the performance, that’s how we perceive them. So it
seems more realistic, and more appropriate, to evaluate recordings and their relationship
to live performance from a perceptual point of view.

¶95 From this perceptual point of view, one dimension is of course lacking, and that’s
the visual. Hearing music without seeing it being performed is a different experience.
When we can see what the performers are doing as they make the sounds we gain a
visual experience that’s at least closely tied to the sound. But what sort of tie is it, and it
is always helpful? Performers make two kinds of movement (considered conceptually),
movements necessary to produce the sound (for example moving a bow over a string)
and movements that express visually something that they mean the sound to express. A
movement of the bowing arm may be accompanied by a movement of the whole upper
body, or a visibly indrawn breath, for example. Those kinds of visual signals can
contribute to a significant degree to the meaning of a performance, and on record they
are entirely lost. As compensation in the studio, a player may decide to make the sound
gesture larger to compensate for the lack of video. One can’t as a listener recreate the
original visual gestures, though an experienced listener will undoubtedly invent gestures
of her own in her mind as she listens, in so far as she is imagining the performers
performing. So there is a downside to recordings in this respect, but it’s not as great as
is sometimes made out. Moreover, much of the visual information that one takes in
during a live performance is, however normal, distracting. The horn player draining spit
out of his valve—which, as Davies reminds us, 108 fascinated the young John Cage more
than the music—is not conducive to a sublime musical experience. Nor is the soloist
mopping his brow; nor even the Evangelist’s stagey solemnity. Listening without seeing
can very easily gain in intensity.

¶96 More important shortcomings of recordings than this include the absence, in most
domestic circumstances, of the physical impact of the sound hitting one’s body in a
three-dimensional soundspace. New technology is doing something to address this, and
the option of playing recordings at a realistic volume does help. Although a believable
facsimile of concert-hall sound is much closer than it was, we’re not yet in a position to
use a recording to talk usefully about that in an academic study (at least, I’m not). The
other major shortcoming, which has yet to be addressed although the technology is
available, is the predictability of recordings once one gets to know them that Davies and
so many others have noted. Recordings with programmable options for randomly varied
sequences of takes would be interesting to try, and, for reasons that will become clear in
a moment, might not be as unsatisfactory from a musical point of view as we might
think.

¶97 What this seems to suggest, then, is that recordings are by no means inherently
unsatisfactory as substitutes for being present at a concert. Certainly they are different
from a cultural point of view: they are not just experiences but artefacts that can
facilitate experiences, but so are concert halls and orchestras. They make use of illusion,
but provided one doesn’t insist on taking a moral stand opposed to illusion of any sort,
the illusions they produce can be just as fascinating as the real thing. What we need to
do, then, if we are to answer this question about the acceptability of recordings as
research data on performance, is to make a practical distinction between what
recordings are (or can be argued to be)—which is something culturally very complex
that involves all sorts of illusions both on the production side and in the listening—and
what they are perceived to be when one listens to the music. The brain treats them as
performances, and is content to overlook all the tricks that went into making them and
all the illusions that we could say are present in the sound as heard. And we're happy to
do that first because in terms of style recordings operate within the range of possible
performances that people currently find acceptable at the time of their production, and
secondly because any unrealities in the sound are not perceived as problematic provided
that the performance is interesting enough in itself. I don't mean to suggest that knowing
how recordings were made is of secondary importance. The discrepancy between the
'original' and what is perceived is one of the things that's so interesting about them,
which is another reason why we need to know about how they’re made (as well as the
need to keep tabs on producers, and the inherent interest of the facts). My point is rather
that we shouldn't allow our historians’ respect for the facts to blind us to the value of the
illusion that we hear, because in the end it's the illusion that makes the music in our
minds.

¶98 So having attempted an answer to our question in principle, let’s now go back to the
practice and try to understand how it looks from the studio perspective. What is the
producer trying to achieve? The short answer is that that depends on the producer, but
each is, in the end, employed to produce something that will sell. So the producer, to a
considerable extent and whatever her artistic aims, responds to what is perceived to be
current taste among record buyers, as well as—more directly—whatever she believes
the record company expects of her. But accepting that, what are the producer’s artistic
aims? A very interesting case study is offered by Robert Philip in his observation of a
recording produced by Andrew Keener, a freelance producer working on this occasion
for Hyperion. 109 Keener emphasises the need for cleanliness and repeatability, as one
would expect a modern producer to. But beyond that he sees editing as a process of
‘collecting all the jewels’: a jewel may be ‘a nuance, ... a group of notes which are most
beautiful, which that person didn’t play in quite that most beautiful, spontaneous,
coloured way in any subsequent take... And you owe it to the artist to mine the ... takes
for that kind of thing.’[55-6] ‘But’, as Philip explains, ‘the starting-point is complete
takes.’ For Keener, then, the aim is to discover, from listening to complete
performances at the start, what the performers are trying to achieve, and then to create a
more perfect representation of that than they can achieve in any one take.

¶99 Other producers, sharing Keener’s general artistic aim, may seek to reproduce what
they perceive to be the performers’ sense of overall structure, what producers
sometimes call 'the span', and in order to do so may choose takes that are not necessarily
the best in every way but that work together cumulatively to create the sense of
structure that the performers create in a single successful run-through. 110 Others may
prefer to focus on the moment, and in that case will use the most beautiful and accurate
takes they have. Keener’s approach is an idealistic composite of those two somewhat
opposed options (albeit one requiring a great many edits). And any producer one might
interview would come up with slightly different aims again. But few classical music
producers have any interest in producing performances that don’t sound like very good,
real, performances.

¶100 Producers may also play a considerable role in shaping the performance as
conceived by the musicians—the ‘span’ itself—through comments and (diplomatically
phrased) advice. So their musical role isn’t confined to post-production work, to being
creative with the takes. But how much input a producer can have at that level depends
very much on the performers. While an experienced and widely respected producer can
intervene quite a lot with young performers, stars make their own judgement of what’s
successful and, aside from requesting additional takes to deal with creaking chairs,
noisy page-turns, planes overhead, and so on, the producer may not be able to get
musical decisions changed. A lot depends on personalities, and one can’t define the role
of the producer on any particular disc without being there oneself or at least
interviewing a lot of people involved. Moreover, performers experienced at recording
may be very good indeed at picking up speeds and styles (moods, atmospheres, levels of
concentration) when recording patches or sections of a movement so that they match
exactly what’s already been put down. Thus the producer in sticking together takes is
not having to do anything much to select those takes that fit together best. The
performer’s conception survives being recorded in bits. In general, then, the influence of
the producer can be exaggerated easily, but on those occasions when it is considerable it
can be extremely creative.

¶101 What are the consequences of this relatively benevolent view of the role of the
producer for our view of what a recording is? The first thing to understand is that
performance can be flexible in several dimensions (frequency, amplitude, duration) and
still be convincing. That is to say, a performer can play a phrase one way, or another,
and still make good sense with it within the context of the performance so far. Editing
can therefore change details of a recorded performance, just as a live performer can be
unpredictable (even to herself) in what she’s going to do next. And that means that
whatever one may feel in principle about editorial intervention in the studio one can’t
argue that it’s undesirable on musical grounds. A performance produced after editorial
changes can be just as persuasive as one produced without them.

¶102 One can test the limits of this flexibility by editing existing recordings, changing,
for example, the lengths of pauses or cadential preparations to see how much they can
be stretched or contracted before one arrives at a musically unacceptable reading.
Everything depends on context, but in many cases there is no difficulty about accepting
a wide range of note lengths in such situations. Of course the consequences will be
subtly different, and each would have tended to encourage the performer to play what
follows in a slightly different way, just as each would, in a real performance, be the
consequence of slightly different preceding passages. To a certain extent the performer
is improvising these effects and their consequences as he plays, taking a chance on
holding a note, or speeding up a little, or playing a fraction louder, waiting for the right
moment to move on. The results can be measured and thought about, and that in turn
may offer ways of studying the process, for example by getting this kind of work on
music-making to interact with empirical work on perception and brain-hand
coordination in performance.

¶103 How far can the length or loudness or some other quality of a note be changed
before it no longer works or before it comes to mean something else? In a previous
study I illustrated a ready-made example from a Deutsche Grammophon disc of
Schubert songs sung by Kathleen Battle accompanied by James Levine. 111 It’s a phrase-
join in Nähe des Geliebte, and ‘offers a rare but useful example of an editorial change
that definitely doesn’t work because it’s not plausible, it wouldn’t happen in any
imaginable current live performance.’ 112 And of course that is the crucial test. If we can
imagine it happening live then we can live with it. This DG disc is very heavily edited.
On the minus side that means one has to use it with great caution, but on the plus side it
means we can learn something of what’s gone on. DG has high production standards, so
it seems safe to assume that this particularly awkward moment survived onto the disc
because, for whatever reason, the session ended without everything perfectly ‘in the
can’.

Figure 2: Timings in Battle/Levine, Nähe des Geliebte, bb. 4-6

¶104 Figure 2 shows the notation of the relevant passage, annotated with the length of
each quaver. (The offending edit comes right at the end.) What’s happened is that the
final quaver of b. 5 [1’ 09”], setting ‘In’, has lost 0.2–0.25s from its end. The expected
length can be worked out by what leads immediately up to it. In the preceding bars
there’s a pattern set up of longer sixth quavers: have a look at ‘-nen’ of ‘fernen’, then
‘der’, then ‘sich’; the end of the bar seems to be setting up the same ritenuto, but
sooner—the quaver before ‘In’ is already as long as the quaver at ‘sich’, though it’s not
yet the end of the bar, so the last quaver must be expected to be longer still, probably
about 0.6–0.65s, certainly not 0.36. And it sounds as wrong as it looks. This example
illustrates just how small a departure from expectations can disrupt the effect of a
performance. This seems paradoxical when one considers how wide the range of
possible variation is in timing and amplitude at any moment in a performance. Clearly
some kinds of changes are artistic and some are disastrous, and it’s not a matter of how
great they are but rather of how they fit into their context. Although irregularities in
note-length can be extreme and still musical (in the sense of ‘acceptable to musicians’),
they have to belong within a trend, and one that is related to the musical structure (by
which I mean the notated pitches & durations and the ways in which experienced
musicians believe that they interrelate).

¶105 Now we’re in a better position to deal with this question of the extent to which a
studio-edited recording can be considered as a performance, one from which we might
safely draw conclusions about how performance works. Because of the enormous range
of possibilities for convincing performances, even within the style-criteria of one place
and time, we know that at any moment in a performance the performer has many
different options; and provided that they are reasonably competent, whichever option
they take when deciding how to play or sing the next note can be made adequately
convincing by what follows. This is why recordings assembled by an editor in a studio
from hundreds of different bits of digitally encoded sound work. The producer is a
performer and performs the piece with the fragments of the performer’s recorded
performances. And a recording made this way is thus every bit as much a musical
performance as an unedited recording made in a single take.

¶106 So I don’t believe that we need be as concerned as we sometimes have been about
recordings falsifying the performance or the act of performance. It’s nice to hear
recordings that faithfully reproduce what a great performer did, but it won’t necessarily
be better than a performance edited together in the studio: sometimes it will, sometimes
it won’t. 113 What’s lost in recording—the sense of being there as it happens—is lost
however the recording was made.

¶107 I don’t, therefore, entirely accept the argument that studio recordings are not
performances. Of course, in an obvious and literal sense they are not. They are
(nowadays) compiled from bits of many (usually incomplete) performances. Earlier
they were performances recorded whole but very imperfectly. But when we listen to a
recording we listen not to its construction but to its effect. And so the argument that a
recording isn’t a performance (however it was made) misses the point. If it didn't sound
like a performance it wouldn't be issued on disc, and if it sounds like one then it is one.
What matters is that it’s experienced as a performance. Because it’s the sound that
offers the proof of the pudding. Performance sounds, and if it sounds like performance
then that’s the appropriate measure of whether it is. Recordings do what performances
do well enough that we hear them as performances. This should encourage us to take the
details of a recorded performance as the material for studies that seek to explain how
music works, even though they may not represent any reality that could exist in a live
performance. Provided that they work for us, they work, and that tells us something
important about what music is. It's what we perceive as music, not what, looking at the
production processes, we might say it 'really' is.

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Footnotes

1.
On the early years (pre-electrical) see Walter L. Welch & Leah Brodbeck
Stenzel Read, From Tinfoil to Stereo: the acoustic years of the recording
industry (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 1994; rev. ed. of Oliver Read
and Walter Welch, From tin foil to Stereo (1976)). A very good brief
introduction to the whole period is Peter Copeland, Sound Recordings, (London:
The British Library, 1991). A good medium-length survey up to the end of the
LP is Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977 (2nd rev. ed.,
London: Cassell, 1977). There are also several excellent treatments of recording
and its cultural impact, including: Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: music,
records and culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven: Yale University
Press,1987 (London: Picador, 1988); 2nd rev. ed. 2005); Michael Chanan,
Repeated Takes: a short history of recording and its effects on music (London:
Verso, 1995); and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: cultural origins of sound
reproduction (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2003). Sterne is
outstandingly good on the pre-history of sound recording and its cultural
influence. Back to context...
2.
Peter Copeland’s ‘Manual of analogue audio restoration techniques’ published
posthumously by the British Library online, is a magnificent contribution that
appeared just as this book was nearing publication. I am grateful to Nigel
Bewley of the BL Sound Archive for allowing me to see three chapters in
advance. Back to context...
3.
An important and relevant study (sadly unknown to me when I wrote this
chapter) is George Brock-Nannestad's 'The critical approach to sound recordings
as musicological sources', Musiikki 1-4 (1989), 423-35. See also his 'Zur
Entwicklung einer Quellenkritik bei Schallplattenaufnahmen', Musica 35 (1981),
76-81. Some of the following has been reused in Roger Beardsley and Daniel
Leech-Wilkinson, A brief history of recording (published online by the Centre
for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music, 2006). Back to context...
4.
Copeland (1991), 7. Cf. Chanan (1995), 2. Back to context...
5.
Gelatt (1977), 32. Back to context...
6.
Welch & Read (1994), 32 Back to context...
7.
I owe this description of Berliner’s process, and many other details here, to
Roger Beardsley’s meticulous editing of an earlier draft. For a full description of
the process, of which this is a simplification, see Beardsley’s online essay
‘Waxes, shells and stampers’. Back to context...
8.
On some of the difficulties see F[red] W. Gaisberg, Music on Record (London:
Hale, 1946), 104-5, 109; also Miller & Boar (1982), 44-55. For a detailed study
of Fred Gaisberg see Jerrold Northrop Moore, Sound Revolutions: a biography
of Fred Gaisberg, founding father of commercial sound recording (London:
Sanctuary, 1999). Back to context...
9.
Tuesday, Oct 05, 1909, p. 11; issue 39082; col. D. More examples are quoted in
Welch & Burt (1994), 146; and (on Edison’s Diamond Discs demonstrations
with Maggie Teyte) Eisenberg (1987/2005), 90-1. Warm thanks to Alison
Bullock for the Times report. Back to context...
10.
Gelatt, plate 2, reproduces a delightful advertisement for Edison’s phonograph
which boasts that ‘It will Talk, Sing, Laugh, Crow, Whistle, Repeat Cornet
Solos, imitating the Human Voice, enunciating and pronouncing every word
perfectly, IN EVERY KNOWN LANGUAGE.’ Back to context...
11.
My main sources for what follows are two fascinating papers by George Brock-
Nannestad: ’Authenticity in the Reconstruction of Historical Disc Recording
Sessions’, Preprint of paper delivered to the Audio Engineering Society’s 105th
convention, 1998 (AES Preprint 4829); and ‘The Objective Basis for the
Production of High Quality Transfers from Pre-1925 Sound Recordings’,
Preprint of paper delivered to the Audio engineering Society’s 103rd convention,
1997 (AES Preprint 4610). Back to context...
12.
Gaisberg (1946), 52-65. The technicians were then known, very fairly, as
‘experts’. There are rich details and fascinating photographs of Gaisberg’s
travels in Moore (1999) passim, some photographs also in Miller & Boar (1982),
45-55, and a less detailed description of some of their procedures in Peter
Martland, Since Records Began: EMI, the first 100 years (London: Batsford,
1997) 44. Back to context...
13.
Stanley Chapple, ‘In the Recording Studio’, ed. Roger Wimbush, The
Gramophone Jubilee Book (Harrow: Gramophone, 1973), 64-70, reprinting an
article originally published in the December, 1928 issue of The Gramophone.
The diagram is reproduced in Brock-Nannestad (1998) fig 2. For an alternative,
American layout drawn by Fred Gaisberg in 1907, with more space between the
players and three recording horns, see Brock-Nannestad, (1997), fig. 8, p. 37.
Back to context...
14.
A description of the in-house Victor orchestra, its instrumentation and rates of
pay, is quoted in Brock-Nannestad (1997), 27-9. Back to context...
15.
For some pianists’ memories see Day (2000), 10. Back to context...
16.
Gaisberg recalls doing this to Patti: Gaisberg (1946), 86-7. Back to context...
17.
Side lengths depended also on how loud the music was: loud music produced
wavy grooves which took up more space. The engineers did have the ability to
vary the lathe’s transit speed resulting in closer groove spacing and longer
playing time. In the early 1920s, HMV experimented with sides lasting over 8
minutes, but for the most part side-lengths of commercial recordings remained
similar through the latter part of the 78-era. Timings relative to groove sizes are
listed in ‘Columbia Graphophone Company Limited (London): Recording
Expedition Instructions’, p. 18. I’m very grateful to Roger Beardsley for a copy
of this rare pamphlet, now available online through CHARM at
 http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1_2.html. Back to context...
18.
Philip 2004, 36-8, offers some cautionary tales and shows why they need to be
checked against the recordings. A hilarious example, however, is Lev
Sibirjakov’s recording of Schubert's ‘Der Leiermann’ which he sings extremely
slowly on a three-minute disc, forcing the pianist to race through the interludes.
Curiously it remains a magnificent performance. (Matrix 14815 b, recorded by
Fred Gaisberg on 11 September 1910, issued on HMV 4-22135. CD reissue on
‘Schubert Lieder on Record, 1898-1952’ (EMI 5 66150 2), disc 1, track 22.)
Back to context...
19.
This point is made in more detail and with examples in Mark Katz, Capturing
Sound: how technology has changed music (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004), 34-5. Back to context...
20.
For contrasting period views of this practice see Day (2000), 8. Back to
context...
21.
In this section I am particularly indebted to Brock-Nannestad (1997), Appendix
1, 20-22. There is a very fascinating 1942 film of the whole process as operated
at RCA Victor downloadable from
http://www.archive.org/details/CommandP1942. I am most grateful to Roger
Beardsley for drawing my attention to it. Back to context...
22.
Brock-Nannestad (1997), 10. Back to context...
23.
The processes for this are outlined below. Back to context...
24.
For a general survey of the problems see Roger Beardsley, ‘Is it or isn’t it...?’,
International Classical Record Collector 5 (1999), 62-5, also available online at
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_3.html. Back to context...
25.
Cylinders continued to be used by ethnographers in the field until the early
1940s, due to the machine’s portability and its not needing an electricity supply.
Back to context...
26.
On the comparison between cylinders and discs see Welch & Burt (1994), 111-
26. Back to context...
27.
Exactly the same happened with videotape in the 1970s. Back to context...
28.
Gaisberg (1946), 78. Back to context...
29.
Copeland (1991), 10. Back to context...
30.
Transferred by Karsten Lehl from Deutsche Grammophon 043370, matrix 341
av, (rec. 1921) issued on Nippon Polydor 60010, Polydor 76418, and Polydor
85297. See also Barbara F. Stone, ‘Discography of Mme. Frieda Hempel’, The
Record Collector 10 (1955), 65-71. Back to context...
31.
 More will be said about this below. See also Roger Beardsley’s more detailed
explanations at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_4.html. Back to
context...
32.
Transferred by Karsten Lehl from Odeon 36034, matrix xP 1317 (rec. April
1905), acc. Mr. Pickaert (Mustel harmonium). Back to context...
33.
For another curious keyboard sound see John Hunt’s 1933 recording of Chopin
on a ‘Neo-Bechstein’, which turns out to be an early electric piano. Matrix
2B4545-1 (rec. 6 April 1933), issued on HMV C 2567. There’s a transfer
available for download either via the CHARM discography or transfer project.
Back to context...
34.
For the following summary see esp. George Brock-Nannestad, ‘What are the
sources of the noises we remove?’ Paper delivered to the 20th Annual
conference of the Audio Engineering Society, 2001 (AES Paper 1960). Back to
context...
35.
See also Brock-Nannestad (1997), 21. Back to context...
36.
Though reinforcement of the bass line continued on occasion for the sake of
listeners still using acoustic equipment. Back to context...
37.
Surface noise was reduced, especially by HMV (Victor and US Columbia issues
tended to be noisier), but it reappears easily on discs that have been stored in
damp conditions, so surviving copies can be misleading. (My thanks to Roger
Beardsley for the information in this and the previous note.) Back to context...
38.
Transferred by Karsten Lehl from Columbia LFX 250, matrix CLX 1872-1.
Back to context...
39.
Students interested in working on this performance may find it useful to
compare it with others of ‘Die junge Nonne’ available via Daniel Leech-
Wilkinson, ‘Sound and meaning in recordings of Schubert's “Die junge
Nonne”’, Musicae Scientiae, 11 (2007), 209-36. Martinelli’s irregular vibrato is
discussed in chapter 8 below (using Data File 9 (sv file)). Back to context...
40.
Brock-Nannestad, (1997), 13 n. 2, 16 n. 23. Back to context...
41.
Renee Timmers used this approach in testing the influence of surface noise on
people’s perception of performacne quality. ‘Perception of music performance
on historical and modern commercial recordings’, Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 122 (2007), 2872-80. Back to context...
42.
[Unsigned], ‘Gramophone music: encouragement of close listening’, The Times,
42963, 23 (February 1922), p.10 col.B. I am most grateful to Nick Morgan for
sending me the text of this article. Back to context...
43.
For practical advice on using gramophones see Douglas Lorimer, ‘Reproducing
78s: the old-fashioned way’, International Classical Record Collector no. 6
 (Autumn 1996), 62-71. Back to context...
44.
Day (2000), 7, calculates that the 1913 set of discs containing Beethoven's 5th
conducted by Nikisch cost 50% more than the average weekly wage. I have used
Alan Stanier’s tables of equivalences at
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/N-Money.html. Some discs cost
even more: Ruth Edge and Leonard Petts, ‘Keeping tabs on Tamagno’, Classic
Record Collector no. 50 (2007), 40-5, esp. 42. Back to context...
45.
For a useful general introduction by a well-known transfer engineer see Roger
Beardsley’s http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_4.html. Back to
context...
46.
For one expert’s approach see David Patmore and Tully Potter’s interview with
Mark Obert-Thorn, who has done many of the best transfers on Naxos, in
Classic Record Collector No. 47, Winter 2006, 64-7. For his views ten years
earlier see Arthur S. Pfeffer, ‘Mark Obert-Thorn: the moderate interventionist’,
International Classical Record Collector no. 6 (Autumn 1996) 48-56. On Ward
Marston, another giant among transfer specialists, see Arthur S. Pfeffer, ‘Ward
Marston: the compleat transfer engineer’, International Classical Record
Collector no. 3 (November 1995), 63-8. For the view of Andrew Walter, who
has done many of EMI’s reissues, see Andrew Walter, ‘Back to the future: a
personal insight into the remastering of EMI’s back catalogue’, International
Classical Record Collector no. 10 (Summer 1997), 46-51. Back to context...
47.
For competing solutions see http://www.keithmonks-rcm.co.uk/, http://audio-
restoration.com/monks5.php, http://discdoc.com/. For concerns see the debate
with subject heading ‘Highly unorthodox cleaning methods for LP's... ’ in the
Association of Recorded Sound Collections list archive for May 2004:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/arsclist/. Back to context...
48.
http://www.elpj.com/about/ Back to context...
49.
See http://perso.wanadoo.fr/socket/warcheophone.htm. Back to context...
50.
See especially the procedures used by Nimbus, described at
http://www.wyastone.co.uk/nrl/pv_intro.html. Back to context...
51.
Optical scanning of the groove removes the need to select a stylus, preserving all
the information there is, but turning that information into sound is another
matter, and one that has yet to be mastered to everyone’s satisfaction. Back to
context...
52.
Equalisation can also be done later in the digital domain, and there are strong
feelings among specialists about the merits of the two approaches. Back to
context...
53.
See, for example, James R. Powell, Jr., and Randall G. Stehle, Playback
Equalizer Settings for 78rpm Recordings (2nd rev. ed., Portage, Mich.,
Gramophone Adventures, 2002) which, precisely because it attempts to
 standardise solutions to a wildly non-standardised practice, is not to be preferred
to the judgement of a musical ear. Back to context...
54.
Though electronic filters are not always as perfect as we might wish. Back to
context...
55.
For a more detailed description of the types of noise coming off 78s see Roger
Beardsley’s commentary at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/history/p20_4_4.html,
under ‘Record Noise’. Back to context...
56.
This research on non-contact surface scanning of cylinders is in progress at the
University of Southampton:
http://www.soton.ac.uk/ses/research/projects/project016.html,
http://www.sesnet.soton.ac.uk/archivesound/publications/. Back to context...
57.
HMV DB 7648/51. These extracts are from DB 7648, matrix 2B6821-2 (end);
DB 7649, mat. 2B6822-1A (start & end); DB 7650, mat. 2B6823-1 (start &
end); DB 7651, mat. 2B 6824-2 (start). Back to context...
58.
See also Philip 2004, 35-6. Back to context...
59.
An easy comparison to make, since the discs are always available, is between
different transfers of the Menuhin/Elgar recording of Elgar’s violin concerto,
recorded on HMV in 1932. Andrew Walter’s transfer for EMI, in particular,
sounds significantly different from Mark Obert-Thorn’s for Naxos, brighter but
also more muddled and more dominated by the brass. (EMI Classics 7243 5
66979 2, Naxos 8.110902.) Back to context...
60.
The argument is well-made in Plack (2008), ch. 1 p. 4, chiding an earlier version
of this chapter. Back to context...
61.
The same colours were used for the UK 12-inch Series C, as well as the 10-inch
B and equivalent series issued in other territories such as EG, EH, AM, AN etc.
All were collectively known as ‘the plum label’. Back to context...
62.
For the story see Gelatt (1977), 107-9. Back to context...
63.
The purchase tax stamp came in during the Second War. The codes are ‘NT’ –
no tax (small runs and tests), ‘DT’ – double tax, ‘TT’ – triple tax. The
information is often in the pressing instead, right in the centre where the clamp
was fitted. Back to context...
64.
Alan Kelly, HMV Matrix Series: MAT 201 (CDR privately published by Alan
Kelly.) Back to context...
65.
Different companies had different procedures and different means of identifying
takes. Some didn’t do so at all. I use a Gramophone Co. disc as my example
because they were so ubiquitous. The Gramophone Co. also went to unusual
lengths to use well-ordered sequences of prefixes and suffixes surrounding their
matrix numbers, and these generally indicate the local office responsible for the
 recording as well, in some series, as the identity of the recording engineer.
Consequently they can be extremely informative. For details of all the HMV
matrix series see Alan Kelly. ‘General Introduction: The structure of the
Gramophone Company and its output, HMV and Zonophone: analysis of papers
and computer files’, and the introductions to the individual matrix series in
Kelly’s ongoing publication of the Gramophone Co. discography on CDR
(available from Alan Kelly). Summaries will be available through the CHARM
online discography via www.charm.kcl.ac.uk. Back to context...
66.
Metals, let alone unissued metals, rarely survive today, though there are some
fine examples still in the EMI Archive. An interesting collection, including
previously unknown takes, was issued in 2007 by Historic Masters, pressed in
vinyl from the metals preserved at Deutsche Grammophon (originally a branch
of the Gramophone Co.) in Hamburg: ‘Francesco Tamagno 12” recordings
complete’, HM FT1/7. Back to context...
67.
Frank Andrews and Ernie Bayly, Catalogue of HMV Series “B” Records
(Wells-next-the-Sea: City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society,
2000). Back to context...
68.
Roger Beardsley, who has contributed most of these paragraphs on early
transfers, comments: ‘All these were made by the Gramophone Co. affiliate
Victor in the USA, but pressed by HMV as part of the matrix exchange
agreement. When Victor could no longer supply stampers for popular titles, a
mechanical transfer was made. Interestingly, the mechanical dubbing equipment
used by HMV was made by Victor since HMV’s own machine was not good
enough. However, it was acknowledged that the HMV engineers got the best
results from the system.’ Back to context...
69.
For a fine picture of the wear test in action (though from the LP era) see
Martland (1997), 140. Back to context...
70.
For example CWR 1234-II would become CWR 1234-II T1. Back to context...
71.
Björling’s ‘Di quella pira’ (Il Trovatore) recorded in Stockholm was originally a
0SB prefix recording. When transferred for issue, it was allocated a 0EA
(English Head Office) series number. Back to context...
72.
On the business aspects of the early duplication process: Raymond R. Wile,
‘Duplicates in the nineties and the National Phonograph Company’s bloc
numbered series’, ARSC Journal 32 (2001), 175-216. Back to context...
73.
Failing a good discography, two useful starting points for dates are Eddie Shaw,
Dates About all Those English Seventy-eights, Part 1 Commercial, (London:
Shaw, 1994; 2nd rev ed 1995); and Steven C. Barr, The Almost Complete 78 rpm
Record Dating Guide (II) (Huntington Beach, CA.: Yesterday Once Again,
1992). Back to context...
74.
Trezise (forthcoming 2009). Back to context...
75.
 Rolls are nowadays increasingly distributed as MIDI files. See
http://www.pianola.co.nz/ for one useful source. Back to context...
76.
The fullest online source of information at the moment (November 2007) is
http://www.pianola.org. Back to context...
77.
Information supplied by Denis Hall in November 2007, updating his essay, ‘The
Reproducing Piano and its Recordings’, booklet with Ignace Jan Paderewski in
Recital, CD catalogue no. Aeolia 2002. I am extremely grateful to Mr Hall for
his very detailed comments on an earlier draft. Numerical catalogues of classical
music issues can be found, unfortunately without dates of issue, at
http://www.rprf.org/Resources.htm. Back to context...
78.
On the Ampico patents, beginning in 1908, see Rex Lawson, ‘Cleaning the
windows of time: an examination of recording methods for the Ampico re-
enacting piano’, The Pianola Journal 12 (1999), 13-44. Back to context...
79.
For a slightly more sympathetic account of piano roll reproduction, based on
period comments, see Day (2000), 12-6. Back to context...
80.
For a stronger statement of this problem see the very useful discussion of
reproducing pianos in Philip (2004), 30-4. Back to context...
81.
Grieg, Welte roll 1276 (1906), G&T 35517 (1903); Pugno, Welte 543 (1905).
G&T 35504/5 (1903). The roll and disc transfers are by Denis Hall, to whom I
am extremely grateful for sharing them with me and for allowing me to copy
them here. Back to context...
82.
Eliot Levin, ‘Beyond the Groove’, International Piano 8 (2004), issue 32, 42-
59, and issue 33, 38-53, this passage at 39. (My thanks to Nick Morgan for this
reference.) The recordings were issued simultaneously as ‘Piano Rolls &
Discs—Selected Comparisons’, Symposium 1211. The Grieg is track 13,
transferred from Odeon ‘Historic series’ 38266. Back to context...
83.
Compare especially 1903 32”-53”, 1930 31”-50”, modern 34”-55”. Note that
timings are from the start of the music, not the start of the track. Back to
context...
84.
For a published sample of Hall’s work see his ‘Ignace Jan Paderewski’, Aeolia
[CD no.] 2002. Back to context...
85.
‘Ignaz Jan Paderewski, Xaver Scharwenka: Chopin’, Nimbus NI 8816, track 11
(music lasts 4’ 36.5”). ‘Ignace Jan Paderewski’, Aeolia 2002, track 2 (music
lasts 4’28”). Back to context...
86.
Denis Hall informs me that the Duo-Art push-up used by Nimbus was fitted with
a late version of the take-up spool, larger than previously, which would account
for the slowing. Back to context...
87.
For details and discussion see Roy Howat, ‘The New Debussy Edition:
 approaches and techniques’, Studies in Music (1985), 94-113; ‘Debussy and
Welte’, The Pianola Journal 7 (1994), 3-18; and Howat (1997). For a slightly
different view see José A. Bowen, ‘Finding the music in musicology:
performance history and musical works’, in ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark
Everist, Rethinking Music (Oxford University Press, 1999), 424-51 at 438-41.
Back to context...
88.
Ed. Roy Howat, Oeuvres complètes de Debussy, Série I, volume 5: Préludes
(Paris: Durand, 1985), 42-7 & 167. Back to context...
89.
See, for example, Walter Gieseking’s recording on HMV Treasury RLS 752,
disc 1, side 2, band 1 (rec. 1953). It may be worth adding, as a further caution,
that I have heard four recordings of this roll, all at different speeds and different
pitches: ML4291; Telefunken GMA 65, side 1, band 6; ‘Debussy: early
recordings by the composer’, Condon 690-07-011 (issued 1992); and ‘Claude
Debussy: the composer as pianist’, Pierian 0001 (issued 2000), track 2. Back to
context...
90.
See also Leech-Wilkinson in Cook et al. (2009). Back to context...
91.
Carl Reinecke, Mozart Piano Concerto K537, 2nd movt. (extract). Transferred
from Welte 237 (1905) by Denis Hall and used by kind permission. Back to
context...
92.
Jennifer Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936 (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: fifty
years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1996). Back to context...
93.
The surviving multiple copies are now in the King’s Sound Archive at King’s
College London. Back to context...
94.
My main source for this paragraph is Copeland (1991), 21-30, where further
details will be found. Back to context...
95.
Bruckner, 8th Symphony: Preussischer Staatskapelle cond. Herbert von Karajan,
Koch Swann 3-1448-2 (Berlin, 28 June (mts. 2-3), 29 September (mt. 4) 1944).
Back to context...
96.
There is a photo of the first model of EMI tape machine, the BTR1, in Martland
(1997), 152. Back to context...
97.
Walter Legge, continuing from the passage quoted earlier about Gaisberg’s view
of records as sound photographs, says, ‘My ideas were different. It was my aim
to make records that would set standards by which public performances and the
artists of the future would be judged to leave behind a large series of examples
of the best performances of my epoch.’ (Schwarzkopf (2002), 16) And in that
last clause we can see how in Legge’s mind the difference between
performances and recordings was already blurred. For a good introduction to
Legge as a record producer see Day (2000), 40-3. Back to context...
98.
On the notion of liveness modified by the studio production of popular music
recordings, see Philip Auslander, Liveness: performance in a mediatized culture
(Abingdon: Routledge, 1999). Back to context...
99.
John Culshaw, Ring Resounding: the recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1967). Back to context...
100.
For an example see Robert Philip’s interesting discussion of a recording session
with producer Andrew Keener, Philip (2004), 50-62, especially the example on
p. 55 reproducing a page from Keener’s annotated score indicating the takes to
be used. Back to context...
101.
The following table has already appeared in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson,
‘Expressive gestures in Schubert singing on record’, Nordisk Estetisk Tidskrift
33/34 (2006), 50-70. Back to context...
102.
Godlovitch (1998), 14 and 128, see also 26-7. Back to context...
103.
On the Musical Performance on Record discussion list: mus-perf-
[email protected], 9 December 2002. Back to context...
104.
Cf. Cook (2003). Back to context...
105.
Albin Zak in Cook et al. (forthcoming 2009). Back to context...
106.
Davies (2001), 304-5. For discussion of the disadvantages of repeatability see
Chanan (1995), 118-9. Back to context...
107.
Davies (2001), 309. Back to context...
108.
Davies (2001), 296-7. Back to context...
109.
Philip (2004), 50-62. Incidentally, many further studies of producers and
recording sessions are needed. Back to context...
110.
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood told me how perplexed he was when producing the
late Strauss wind Sonatina no.1 to be faced with a piece in which no span could
easily be realised in the recording: the work seemed not to offer,
compositionally, any obvious incremental solutions or musical 'sweep'. It
seemed to him that his role as a successful producer required him to derive a
new kind of structure from the raw material rather than delivering a series of
takes recognisable by the artist from a live performance. (I am grateful to him
for allowing me to use this anecdote.) Back to context...
111.
DG 419 237-2, track 9, 0’ 57”B1’ 10” Back to context...
112.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006a), 58. The following discussion derives from that
article, 58-9. Back to context...
113.
 Glenn Gould: ‘good splices build good lines, and it shouldn’t much matter if one
uses a splice every two seconds or none for an hour so long as the result appears
to be a coherent whole.’ Gould rather spoils it, however, in his continuation,
which only emphasises his determination to seem mechanistic: ‘After all, if one
buys a new car, it doesn’t really matter how many assembly-line hands are
involved in its production. The more the better, really, insofar as they can help to
ensure the security of its operation.’ (Glenn Gould, ‘Music and technology’,
originally published in Piano Quarterly (Winter 1974-5), reprinted in ed. Tim
Page, The Glenn Gould Reader (New York: Knopf, 1984), 356.) My thanks to
Alex Robinson for this reference. In work on one of my MMus course units at
King’s College in 2004, Robinson also came up with an interesting comparison
of two performances conducted by Frans Brüggen of Schubert’s 9th Symphony ,
one live, one studio. He asked listeners which they thought was which; most
were wrong. Their judgement depended on the vividness of the recorded sound,
and in fact the studio sound was notably livelier than the sound from the concert.
This only emphasises, as Robinson pointed out, that our preconceptions about
the differences are more important than the differences themselves. Back to
context...

Document Contents

• 3. Understanding the sources: Performance and recordings

o 3.1. How early recordings were made
o 3.2. Transferring and listening to early recordings
o 3.3. Discs and discography
o 3.4. Piano rolls
o 3.5. LPs
o 3.6. Digital sound
o 3.7. Editing and its implications

©2009 King's College London,

The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

4. Changing Performance Styles: Singing

¶1 Sound File 13 (wav file) is a transfer by Roger Beardsley from a 1911 recording of
Elena Gerhardt singing Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’ (D 547), accompanied by Arthur
Nikisch. 1 It’s worth hearing now because it helps us to focus on one of the key
questions raised by early recordings. Why did people sing and play the notes on the
page in ways that to us seem so strange? How can ‘An die Musik’, to take just one
example, ever have made sense to people sung like this? Yet it did. Gerhardt was one of
the most celebrated singers of her time, and this is now one of her most valued and
valuable recordings (as I discovered when trying to acquire a copy to use for this book).
For Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in 1951, Gerhardt as an
interpreter of German song ‘developed a mastery of phrasing, enunciation and tone-
colour which have set a standard difficult to approach’, 2 and in this recording she
achieved ‘superb results’. 3 Yet for John Austin (of Kangaroo Ground, Australia),
writing an Amazon review of a modern reissue on October 9, 2000,

Conductor Arthur Nikisch and soprano Elena Gerhardt were musicians of great renown
in their day, but their 1911 performance of ‘An die Musik’ is frankly appalling. Nikisch
plays the opening accompaniment quickly, then slows to half speed when Gerhardt
enters. What follows, for nearly four minutes, is not so much a tribute to music as a
travesty of it. Altogether there is little offered by the early 20th Century generation of
singers that I should like young singers of today to hear. 4

¶2 What has changed? And what does John Austin fear might happen if young singers
heard Gerhardt? Was her performance always appalling, and was everybody who so
admired her wrong? Or is it just that taste has changed? If the latter, then is ‘taste’ a
strong enough word to describe the reshaping of responses to such an extent that a
modern writer can fear for the musical health of the young? And if people have changed
that much, why might hearing Gerhardt have any appeal for young singers today? What
would be the danger in their hearing her? Clearly powerful emotions are involved in
responses to performances like this, and one of the things we’re going to need to do in
this chapter is to explain how such differences are possible. In subsequent chapters
we’ll begin to see why people feel so strongly about them.

¶3 First, though, we need some context. The best way to provide this, I think, is to take
a selective tour of twentieth-century performance practices, working chronologically
from the earliest recordings, and taking instruments—voice, violin, piano—that have
somewhat self-contained traditions before we try to look either at what they have in
common or at how performance works on a much more detailed scale. 5 With those
overviews to hand, we’ll be in a better position to think about the mechanisms that
cause these changes in style and about the relationship between styles of music-making
and writing about music. Then we can come back to the more fundamental problem of
the changing nature of musicianship.

¶4 I ought not to need to justify beginning with singing, where there is text that directs
emotional responses more narrowly, and only then moving on to instrumental playing,
where there is not. But the prejudice of musical academia in favour of instrumental
music (‘absolute’ music), precisely because its meaning is not reified by text, is so long
and was until recently so strongly established that I probably should say something
about it. Aaron Ridley has dealt with this at length from a philosophical point of view, 6
arguing that music particularises text as much as vice versa. That is so; and we shall see
as we go along, especially in chapter 8 below, how multiple cues combine to
particularise our sense of what any kind of music means to us: 7 text is only one source
of cues, a very significant one when it’s in a language we understand, but not (as it
were) the whole story.

¶5 But my reason for starting with song is simpler than that. I want us to be able to see
musical sounds in relatively precise relation to sounds from life before we move on to
look at musical sounds whose relationship with anything else is much less definable.
What I’m really examining in this book are the things performers do with sound that
make music (emotionally) moving. 8 My argument is that this happens from moment to
moment as performers ‘shape’ some aspect of the musical sound—its frequency,
loudness or pitch (or a combination of those)—in relation to the musical score on the
one hand and on the other in relation to associations we bring as listeners (and the
performers bring similarly) by knowing what sounds like those mean in the
environment and in our lives. Understanding the relationship with scores is easy; or at
any rate, musicology has been doing it very well for generations and I have nothing to
add. But understanding how musical sounds draw on sounds from life is much harder,
because the associations are rarely crude; if they were, music would be so commonplace
in its expressivity that it would bring no added value: one might as well hear the
environmental sounds themselves and have done with it. If we want to make any
progress towards understanding what a momentary adjustment of loudness in a Bach
partita is doing for us, then we need to gain a lot of understanding by working first of all
in musical situations that are much simpler. And this is why I begin with song. Words
help us to understand the things singers do with the music that sets them. If we can see
some coherent procedures at work there, ways in which musical sounds refer to other
kinds of experiences of change over time, then we can make progress towards
understanding situations in which there is no text, and no intention to emulate text,
simply change in sound over time. For my purposes, aiming to find out more about how
music is expressive and of what, song is a very good place to start.

¶6 The other thing I want to do because it’s a necessary preliminary to understanding

how music moves us is to propose and illustrate a variety of ways of studying musical
performances, using recordings as my sources. And so as we go through the next three
chapters, as well as showing how style changed I’ll be offering various approaches to
finding out what performers are doing from moment to moment, before in chapter 8 we
find out how to get down to the smallest details.

¶7 I mentioned when we were looking at the limitations of early cylinders and discs that
singers recorded particularly well, especially sopranos and tenors. This was due to the
limited frequency response of the equipment coinciding with the most important part of
the spectrum for vocal sounds—between about 150 and 2000Hz—and the relatively
high energy that a voice could direct down the recording horn compared with other
kinds of instruments. So listening to an early recording one could get a more complete
sense of the sound of a voice than, say, a piano, whose sound couldn’t be focussed, or a
violin whose sound wasn’t strong enough. The instrument most recorded, therefore, in
the early years was the voice. Producers, as we now call them—‘experts’ in the
Gramophone Company’s terminology—quite literally went out of their way to find and
record as many singers as possible in order to build up a catalogue of saleable discs as
fast as they could. We’ve already seen Fred Gaisberg taking a year-long trip to India
and the Far East in 1902-3, and bringing close on 600 recordings back. He had made
similar trips to Russia in 1900 and 1901, and before that to Italy, France and Spain in
1899, and to Italy again in 1902, focusing his search for suitable artists always on
singers, albeit with excursions for popular instrumental items. 9 Consequently, most of
the oldest musicians we have on record are singers.

¶8 On the face of it, that might not seem a very promising statistic, for the oldest voices
might not always be the ones we most want to hear. More interesting is that these are
the musicians trained earliest in the 19th century, and for anyone trying, as many do, to
extend the evidence of recordings back into a time before recording was invented, this is
particularly tantalising evidence. We have to be very careful, though. Is an old voice
fairly representative? Do musicians change their performance styles with the times?
(We’ll come back to this later, especially in chapter 6 on piano playing: 10 broadly, some
do and some, perhaps most, don’t, or not very much. But of course this conclusion is
based on 20th-century evidence, and patterns could have changed.) At any rate, it seems
fair to assume that we know more about singing than anything else from the later 19th
century , and much more than we do about, say, orchestral playing. The earliest
recorded singers tantalise us, therefore, and it’s very tempting to suppose that the
earliest sounds we hear from them represent a tradition going back towards
composers—Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven—with whom the
western classical tradition remains obsessed but about whose performance we otherwise
know with certainty little (Brahms and Wagner) or next to nothing (anyone earlier).

¶9 The other tantalising factor, though it may be misleading, is that vocal performance
styles changed early in the recorded era; indeed, they probably had already changed for
many singers before recording began, so that only the oldest singers seem to belong to
the older style. It’s very tempting to suppose, therefore, that those few represent a
tradition going back a long way. Several very interesting attempts have been made to
relate their styles to earlier 19th-century writings on singing, 11 and one can certainly
make a plausible argument along those lines. But arguments are one thing, and recorded
sounds quite another. The former, in the end, are wishful thinking (though possibly
correct wishful thinking), the latter are evidence. So if we’re to give proper weight to
the evidence we do need to be cautious in arguing back. 12 That said, what we hear from
these oldest recorded singers is very fascinating.

¶10 Let’s begin with perhaps the most famous. Adelina Patti was born in 1843, and
since she was already performing professionally in her teens it’s likely that her
performance style was fairly well-formed by 1860. Her recordings, though, were made
in 1905 and 1906 after she’d stopped giving public performances. 13 It’s obvious that
her voice is not what it was; she finds it hard to sustain long phrases without taking a
breath, high notes can screech, chest notes can be rasping, and from time to time a note
breaks altogether, but these flaws due to age are less striking than the qualities that
remain. 14 Outstanding among them is the ease with which she gets from note to note,
even in the fastest decorative passages. The impression of fluidity this produces results
from very short onsets for each note she sings; her voice hits each pitch precisely, its
full tone and volume reached very quickly, so that the sequence of fully-voiced pitches
is hardly interrupted at all by the formation of each new note. Partly this is a matter of
forming consonants very briefly; and sometimes they can be so brief as to be inaudible,
in which case diction suffers and we seem to be hearing vocalise rather than sung text.
Partly it is due simply to the fast reaction time of her vocal chords. In addition, in
melismas she joins notes together with rapid portamento, even on repeated pitches
which she typically manages by scooping down very fast at the end of the first note and
up rather less fast at the start of the second.

¶11 Together with this goes a clear and even tone, caused by strong first and second
harmonics (the fundamental and octave), a slightly less strong third harmonic (twelfth),
and strong partials in the region between 2500 and 3500Hz. How bright it was we can
no longer know for sure, since the recordings transmit no frequencies above 4000Hz.
Hanslick, Wolf, and Emmanuele Muzio (writing to Verdi) all described it as ‘silvery’, 15
a metaphor usually associated with brightness caused by a few strong upper partials, so
we may well have lost something significant (Muzio thought it already lost in 1886), but
it may also be meant to convey an element of fluidity, so that we can’t know the balance
between their sense of her voice as limpid and as bright. But even so, we can easily
agree with 19th-century critics who found it ‘melting’, ‘liquid’ (Emma Eames), 16
‘flexible’ (Charles Dickens and John Cox), 17 and above all ‘pure’ (Eames, Camille
Belaigue). 18 Her timing is relatively exact, at least from one bar to the next, although
there is flexibility from note to note. 19 It is a voice that emphasises line, continuity and
melody much more than drama or rapid changes of emotion. Beautiful singing seems to
matter more than emphasising remarkable moments in the text. Generally, most of the
expressive work is done by changes in amplitude, which are wide and surprisingly well
recorded for this date, and by much more subtle variations in timing from beat to beat.
Less commonly she scoops up to notes—the technique long known in the teaching
tradition as cercar la nota—in order to emphasise specific points in text or musical
structure. 20 Portamento across pitch intervals she uses quite a lot, but in some songs
much more than others; her vibrato is fast and by subsequent standards shallow, so
much so as on occasion to be barely noticeable. In its general character her singing is
unaffected and simple, and much more like modern early music singing than was the
singing of the generations immediately following her.

¶12 How much of this is really about Patti’s voice and how much about the sound of
CD reissues is a question that’s complicated by the impossibility of knowing the speed
at which the original discs were recorded. As I write I have six transfers to hand, and a
vinyl pressing from the original metal, of matrix 683c (G & T 03084), a recording of
‘Ah, non credea mirarti’ from Bellini’s La Sonnambula made at her home in Wales in
June 1906. Three transfers agree on a pitch for the key-note of 414Hz (modern a’-flat);
21
one is pitched at 407 (flat a’-flat); 22 two (including a CD transfer of the metal) at
392Hz (modern g’); 23 and one at 430 (a flat modern a’). 24 There is almost a tone
between the highest and the lowest, and none is necessarily correct, for reasons we saw
in chapter 3. Patti’s voice sounds very significantly different at the highest and lowest of
those pitches. It’s always tempting to accept the compromise (which is what I’ve done
for the description of her voice above, based on the Symposium transfer), and as you
might expect it does indeed sound less girlish than the highest transfer, and less
matronly than the lowest, but there is no way of knowing which was Patti. We simply
have to accept that we can’t know for sure how she sounded or whether the comparisons
we make with other singers are quite accurate. 25

¶13 Patti was taught, like many singers of her generation, by Manuel Garcia, son of the
Manuel Garcia who was one of Rossini’s singers. Garcia the younger wrote up their
teaching in Traité complet de l'Art du Chant, Paris, 1841 and 1847. 26 Both here and in
the later summary of his teaching, as learned at first hand by Hermann Klein, all the
emphasis is on steadiness and purity of tone, managed through even breath pressure,
open vowels, voice production forward in the mouth, and above all perfect legato
producing sequences of equally powered and coloured notes strung seamlessly together,
enhanced by lightly-sung portamento. 27

¶14 We can get another angle on this tradition of fluid melodic singing by listening to
one of the oldest recorded musicians, Sir Charles Santley, born in 1834, so aged almost
70 when he was recorded in 1903. Though English, Santley studied in Italy in the 1850s
and then with Garcia in London, and so it is not surprising to find him singing in this
same legato style. A fine example is his recording of ‘Non più andrai’ from Mozart’s Le
Nozze di Figaro. According to Hanslick his voice was already aging in 1886, 28 and by
1903 we are clearly listening to an old man; but vocal colour is not by any means the
only factor determining our sense of a singer’s skill: among others that shine though
Santley’s performance are steadiness and consistency of tone, subtlety of rubato, and
this same ability as Patti has to sing legato without being shapeless. 29

¶15 The steadiness comes from an even vibrato, slightly slower and considerably wider
than Patti’s, as is characteristic of male compared to female singers around 1900;
consistency of tone is modified only by the darkened vowels of his pronunciation (lower
and further back in the throat than one would expect today); the rubato is very slight,
and corresponds to stresses in Italian rather than to meanings of words; the legato is
achieved by breath control, of course, and by the ease with which notes sound, just as in
Patti, but unlike Patti Santley manages what one might think an almost impossible task
of articulating legato, done by decreasing the loudness of articulated notes at their ends
but without stopping them entirely, and on occasion by simultaneously sliding below
the next note in order to crescendo and scoop into it: the scoops are fast enough that one
perceives them not as pitch change but as emphasis. When he wants something more
continuous he has graded options to hand, at the first level continuing the tone without
diminuendo, at the second joining notes with portamento (though he does this rarely). 30
The most expressive words are sung out, when there is time, and with more vibrato (for
example, ‘molto onor’) and, when there isn’t time, with a small fast scoop.

¶16 The other fascinating detail, more discussed by the critics, is his ornamentation,
which is extremely fast, flexible and integrated into the legato by widening two vibrato
cycles far enough to reach an adjacent pitch. 31 Surprising only because the character of
the performance is brisk and bracing (as the text suggests) is the cadenza at the end of
the B-section, which uses Mozart’s pause sign to leap up a fifth, hold it, run down a
scale through an octave and a half to bottom G, and then slide back up to the G from
which he began, before taking a breath and launching into the pseudo da capo. By
articulating the descending scale more than usual Santley manages all this without a
trace of sentimentality; which is a useful lesson in the integration of ornamentation into
a performance: done in the right way it has none of the sense of indulgence that is too
often attributed to early 20th-century singing by writers unattuned to the stylistic
context.

¶17 Compared to our own expectations this performance seems informal, light-hearted,
fluent, easily achieved (though at 69 years old it cannot possibly have been), and in a
way natural. This last word is a tricky one, of course, and it can only be used as a
comparative—natural compared to what we’re used to. Untrained would be another way
of putting it. But in fact there’s nothing untrained about these singers. They simply
make sounds that are less unlike amateur singing than trained singing became in the
generation that followed them. And the reason for this change, above all, was
orchestrally conceived opera. As singers from Verdi onwards had to make themselves
heard over a growing orchestra—as Wagner, Puccini, and then Strauss required—vocal
training had to develop a sound that would produce strong harmonics relatively high up
the spectrum. The so-called ‘singer’s formant’, developed in Italian tenors and spread
rapidly, carried effectively over much larger accompaniments, but at the cost of lost
flexibility: the energy required from each note could not be generated so quickly; notes
take longer to reach their full amplitude and they require wider vibrato to distinguish
themselves from the instrumental sounds around them. The marked style change that
occurred between this generation, therefore, and the next—singers who grew up with
verismo and Wagner—was caused more than anything by the demands of composers.
We shall see that this is far from always being the case.

¶18 I want to look at one other elderly singer from the first decades of recordings in
order to focus for a moment on the question of how texts were understood and how the
meaning found in them was conveyed in the early 20th century. Texts, and especially
song texts whose poetry was often more subtle and more capable than opera libretti of
bearing a range of interpretations did not always mean the same things to singers then
as they mean now. And it’s possible to see how meanings have changed in line with
changes in performance style. Indeed, the two are inextricably bound up together.

¶19 Sir George Henschel, born in 1850, was a singer, pianist (he studied with
Moscheles), composer and conductor, in fact the first conductor of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. 32 As a singer he accompanied himself, which gives his recordings
of songs a particularly interesting quality, with coherence between voice and piano both
in timing and interpretation. In his teaching Henschel laid particular emphasis on the
expressive potential of vowels. ‘..the five vowels ... are what we may call the primary
colours of the voice. By skilful and judicious mixing of these colours, a singer should be
able to produce as many shades of (let us say) the vowel A as a painter can produce of
(let us say) the colour red.’ And he used to make his pupils sing whole songs on vowels
alone ‘with the object of expressing the character of the music by mere vocalisation.’ 33

¶20 Later on in this study we’re going to look at expressivity in Schubert songs and so
it’s two of Henschel’s Schubert recordings I want to focus on here, ‘Das Wandern’ (the
first song from the cycle Die schöne Müllerin) and ‘Der Leiermann’ (the last from
Winterreise). The first was recorded for HMV in 1914, the year of his retirement, and
again for Columbia in 1928 (we shall look at their very close similarity in chapter 8);
the second was recorded as a coupling for the Columbia release. They were singled out
for particular praise in the first book-length study of Schubert’s songs, by Richard
Capell, first published in 1928. 34 In a list of approved recordings, without much
comment, Henschel’s Columbia discs get Capell’s most enthusiastic endorsement:
‘These records show, no doubt, how Schubert intended his songs to be sung. There is no
show and no self-consciousness about this singing. The performance strikes the right
balance between voice and piano’, as well it might with Henschel accompanying
himself. 35

¶21 Henschel’s seems to us now, as it did to Capell, a straightforward approach. In ‘Das

Wandern’ (Sound File 14 (wav file)) 36 the miller’s boy feels precisely what he sings:
nothing could be more delightful than to go travelling. The jauntiness in Henschel’s
sound is produced by making the notes short, attacking them hard and cutting them off
early, and by raising and lowering the pitch. On a spectrogram each note is an inverted
U, with a rapid crescendo to the top and equally fast decrescendo down. The sense a
listener gets is of top-of-the-world good humour: there are no hidden meanings, no self-
deception; the boy is looking forward to a delightful adventure. For Capell the boy at
the start of Die schöne Müllerin is ‘a lovesick lad in a green valley.’ ‘Schubert’, he says,
‘simply did not know what to do with the bold and the bad of the earth. But he lent his
luckless young miller tones that he could not have bettered if he had wanted them for
himself. And surely just such a one would he himself have been if he had fallen to such
a milleress’s charms; timid and rapturous, flower-plucking and star-gazing, a fount of
tenderness, a gulf of despair.’ 37 It’s easy for us to laugh at this, just as we sometimes
laugh at the singing of 90 years ago. But this is how it seemed. A poet’s love was pure,
generous and honest, and it was in the same spirit that one should sing. And so at the far
end of Müller’s story, in ‘Der Leiermann’ (Sound File 15 (wav file)), 38 Henschel
responds by narrowing his vocal cavity, holding it almost immobile, pulling all the
vowels towards the [ ] (‘arr’) position, maintaining a monotonous colour and level to
suggest the stasis of profound depression. Nothing could be more obviously contrasted
with his performance of ‘Das Wandern’; ‘Der Leiermann’ becomes, as Capell
recommends, ‘An almost toneless song’ and Henschel ‘an unforgettable interpreter’. 39

¶22 In relating Capell and Henschel it’s worth remembering not only that Capell’s was
the first study that considered Schubert’s songs worth examining in depth—earlier
writers on Schubert tended to dismiss most of them as relatively trivial—but also that
Capell’s much more sympathetic view of them comes after some thirty years of
recordings which had made at least some of them better known and widely loved. 40 It’s
an interesting early example of how recordings changed the way music was understood.
41
What had been a reflection of Schubert’s superficiality was now a tribute to his
integrity, thanks in large part to the manner in which his songs were being sung. It’s not
hard to see how these two attitudes fed on one another. The conviction of singers
increased that of writers, and theirs in turn fed back into an increasing intensity in
performances.

¶23 So during the 1920s and 30s we tend to see a gradual inflation in the emotional
intensity of Schubert song performance on record. Of course this is not an isolated style
change. It happens, too, because of a general trend towards more emotionally expressive
performances in all kinds of music during the first four decades of the 20th century. The
change in vocal production, brought about by verismo and Wagner opera, is another
factor, and together they all play a part in the manner of singing we find in the next
generation. All these factors singing, playing, writing, training were shaped by the
general communicative norms of their time. Modernism was, to a considerable extent, a
reaction against precisely this sort of emotionalism. 42

¶24 We can take Lotte Lehmann as a first representative of this more intense style. 43
Born in 1888, Lehmann was in her early career best known as an opera singer,
especially in Strauss and Wagner. Her discography runs to well over 400 items, not
including interviews and master-classes, reflecting her long life (she died in 1976) and
enthusiastic engagement with recording. 44 Lehmann was appreciated not so much for
the quality of her technique, which anyone could hear was flawed, as for her exceptional
ability to communicate feelings through her voice. And in a way, the imperfections in
her singing contribute to her effectiveness as a communicator. One of the variables is
the colour of her voice, which runs from harsh at the bottom (strong in the fundamental
and in dissonant upper partials) to childlike at the top (strong lower harmonics only,
giving a pure tone almost like a treble). 45 In the normal course of events training evens
this out, but Lehmann’s training, at least by her account, seems to have been
unsatisfactory in the extreme. Together with changing tone goes a vibrato that is even in
wavelength but uneven in pitch.

¶25 To a listener the sound seems to suggest a curious mixture of stability and
instability: we sense warmth (the strong consonant lower harmonics), dependability (the
regularly beating vibrato combined with warmth of tone) and yet vulnerability. The
pitch instability is there not just within the vibrato but also in a tendency to drift
upwards very slightly during a note, too little to be perceived as sharpening, but enough
to sound yearning, as if her voice is reaching towards the listener. A sense of eagerness
is increased by her tendency to swoop up to notes at the start of a phrase, and to slide up
from note to note in a rising melodic line, sometimes right through a note as she passes
up the scale. Her approach to linear continuity comes not so much from very fast note
onsets, as in Patti, as from portamento and these other kinds of pitch slides. Indeed,
because her breathing was never well controlled, she breaks up lines into shorter-
breathed units more than most. 46 Yet she was uncommonly valued and loved as a singer
who seemed to involve her audience in every nuance of a song.

¶26 It may be that listeners felt happier then with humanly imperfect voices than we do
now after a long period in which evenness and clarity have been prized most highly. But
to understand Lehmann’s effectiveness as a communicator we need to look also at the
advice she gave to students on interpretation. Teaching books for singers from the 18th,
19th and early 20th centuries were concerned almost exclusively with technique, and
based around exercises. Lehmann’s, and those of a handful of other singers from the
1920s through the 40s, were much more inclined to advise on interpretation, and
especially on what feelings a singer needed to convey. 47 Here she is on Schumann’s
‘Ich grolle nicht’: 48

Change the quality of your voice which has been dark and flowing, at ‘Wie du auch
strahlst in Diamantenpracht’. Sing with a bright tone, disparagingly and ironically, as if
you were saying: “But don’t think I don’t see through you!” ... Sing broadly, with
sorrowful accentuation ‘das weiss ich längst’. ... Turning away from the beloved, still
trembling from your outbreak of bitterness, you now speak more to yourself. ...
completely absorbed with yourself you repeat, trembling, ‘Ich grolle nicht’. Beginning
this verse with a restrained piano will also give a stronger effect in building up the
dramatic climax of the song.
¶27 What we get here is a mixing of advice on vocal colour and dynamics more or
less technical points with description of how the character portrayed feels within the
story, but expressed as advice on how the singer himself should feel: the singer, in other
words, becomes the protagonist; the more successfully, the stronger the musical result.
It’s method acting for musicians. And for Lehmann it clearly works. A recording of her
reading this text (Sound File 16 (wav file)) 49 corresponds exactly to her advice to
singers and makes interesting comparison with her recording of the song from June
1930 (Sound File 17 (wav file)), 50 for the similarities between them emphasise the
extent to which this highly expressive, deeply felt singing, calls on styles of acting for
its communicative power.

¶28 Into this same stylistic world comes Elena Gerhardt’s recording of ‘An die Musik’
with Arthur Nikisch, the recording with which this chapter began. Here again, the
performance decisions are not simply musical; in this case they are not even led very
directly by Schubert’s notation, whose repeated quavers look so even. In Gerhardt’s
recording, quavers in the first two lines of the song vary from 0.34s to 1.04s in length,
with most distributed fairly evenly between 0.4s and 0.8s. In other words a quaver can
vary in length by a factor of 1:3, and quavers frequently vary across as little as a beat by
a factor of 1:2. Whatever drives this performance it’s certainly not the notation. But if
we understand it as Lotte Lehmann would then it makes much better sense. ‘An die
Musik’ is about music itself, its solace, its power to change one’s mood from despair to
ecstasy; it’s about the most profound topic of which a singer can sing. Gerhardt isn’t
singing the score, she’s singing her feelings for music—or at least, acting them out. In a
performance-stylistic world in which intensity of feeling is everything, her rubato
makes perfect sense. (We’ll look at this example more closely in chapter 8.)

¶29 Heinrich Schlusnus was an exact contemporary of Lotte Lehmann, born in 1888, 51
and it’s useful to compare his singing with hers to see whether men manage this
intensely expressive style differently. His voice is much more controlled, both naturally
and artistically; I suppose one could say, adopting terminology of the period, more
manly (strong, direct, but not insensitive). 52 The intensity is there all right, but less in
tempo flexibility or pitch scoops (generally less used in male singing) than in amplitude
and colour. His 1928 recording of ‘An die Musik’ (Sound File 52) (wav file) makes a
useful comparison with Gerhardt’s; 53 he’s really quite strict with tempo, only
lengthening notes markedly right at the end, ‘Ich danke Dir’: and there, as he thanks
Music for all it’s given him, he does adopt almost as overt an emotionalism, fervently
stressing those words, as does she. But for the rest, the intensity comes less from tempo
or sudden change than from increasing amplitude to the high-point of a phrase and then
quickly releasing it, and from an interesting ability to change the depth of his vibrato
(increasing it for expressive passages) and the balance of harmonics, bringing in
harmonics not required by the vowel in order to make a note glow. The resulting
impression is of stability—the manliness—coupled with strength of feeling, with the
emphasis on the strength; where Gerhardt or Lehmann are willing to let pitch or
duration off the leash, Schlusnus simply adds to what he already does without any
parameter ever cutting loose. Nevertheless, the effect is of an intensity that clearly
belongs within the same emotionally expressive world: it could never be mistaken for a
younger Henschel or an earlier Fischer-Dieskau. (Though if he’d made a more beautiful
sound the younger Peter Pears might have come close.)

¶30 If we look back at Patti, now, we can easily see that there has been a very
considerable change in performance style since the beginning of the century. Many
features are shared, including features we no longer hear today—portamento and wide
scoops especially, and because those are so obviously strange to us now we tend on first
hearing to group all these singers together as quaint, or even tasteless. But the ways
Patti and Lehmann, or Santley and Schlusnus, use their voices are actually very
different. For the oldest recorded singers linear continuity is everything; beautiful
singing, expressive of the general sense of a text, is much more important than
following and communicating moment-by-moment changes in the emotional state of the
character they represent, which for Lehmann and Gerhardt, and in a more restrained
manner, for Schlusnus, was what singers were there to do. Different performance styles,
and different conventions of emotional communication, go hand in hand, and music
accordingly takes on different functions and to a certain extent even comes to mean
different things.

¶31 Why the Second World War marked a watershed in musical performance style
remains to be investigated; but it did. After the War that intensely expressive style
seemed hopelessly old-fashioned, exaggerated and unrealistic. Perhaps it was simply
that naivety was impossible after the discovery of the concentration camps, so that
singers of the generation who’d come to adulthood during the Nazi period found they
could no longer represent 19th-century love poetry without a degree of irony. It’s not
coincidental that Freud finally became a significant influence in popular German
thought during the post-War decades. Although psychoanalytic research had continued
through the state-approved Göring Institute during the Nazi period, a new generation of
German psychoanalysts considered themselves to be starting afresh in 1945. Institutes
of psychoanalysis were founded between the late 40s and the mid 60s, and
psychotherapy gradually established itself within the German healthcare system
between the mid-50s and mid-70s. 54 Young Germans after the War were in effect the
first generation for whom psychoanalysis offered an obvious way of understanding
human behaviour. It’s not hard to see how in this context, especially given the weight of
guilt and insecurity about the recent past, a new generation of singers would tend to
read opera libretti and song poetry less literally and less innocently than their
predecessors.

¶32 This proves to be less true of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,
whom I shall look at in more depth in a moment. Schwarzkopf (born 1915) grew up in
the early 30s and prospered during the Nazi period, singing with Deutsche Oper in
Berlin during the War and afterwards at the Theater an der Wien. Apart from the
qualities of her sound, which is unusually even across the spectrum, her singing is
characterised by strong expressive gestures, often using indrawn breaths and drawn-out
final consonants for emphasis; and in that general sense she can be (and has been) seen
as a direct successor to Lotte Lehmann. 55 On the other hand—and it’s this that really
marks her out as a singer from a different world—there is an emotional distance that
would have been incomprehensible to Lehmann. She is particularly good at being
skittish and sly—a side to her art that always appealed to audiences—by using rapid
swoops during notes.

¶33 Deep emotion, on the other hand, she tends to signal rather than to live in the way
that Lehmann believed was essential; and perhaps this is one response to the inhumanity
of the age in which she matured. Characteristic signals include changing vibrato width
from narrow when singing softly (sounding timid) to wide when loud (commanding);
pitch variation within notes, especially sharpening through a note to suggest increasing
intensity of feeling; gaps between notes, covered over by starting the new note on the
old pitch and then very quickly gliding to the new, producing in a song a sense of an
unconfident protagonist feeling her way along; and, above all, these loud and long
noises for final consonants and breaths, used to suggest alarm. Her singing at these
moments comes closest to speech and, because one has the strong sense that this is stage
work with the voice, closest to acting. We never make the mistake of thinking that she
as the singer feels any of this herself.

¶34 At the same time, none of these effects is so spontaneous or heartfelt that it intrudes
on the beauty of her sound: it’s as if she’s happy to play a little, but never with such
abandon as to risk getting muddy. And however speech-like the starts or ends of notes
may be, the rest is musical through and through: there may be a lot of pitch movement
within notes, and scoops between them, as in Lehmann, but the unwritten pitches used
along the way tend to be scale notes, not random frequencies that happen to be nearby,
so that one gets a sense of musically constrained expressivity, not like real speech; and
this too may contribute to the sense that this is formalised—actorly—expressivity. 56 In
other words, however lovely the sound and however expert she may be at representing
texts, Schwarzkopf sings with a detachment that would have been disappointing to a
listener brought up on Gerhardt or Lehmann. Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond
Shawe-Taylor, in their 1951 survey of music available on record, and still more in their
1955 revision, when more of her discs were available, give very much this impression:
that she sings beautifully but has some way to go before she acquires all the abilities of
Lehmann or Elisabeth Schumann. 57 Of course, they were not to know—one never does
while style is changing around one—that Schwarzkopf’s deficiencies were in fact
central features of a new style.

¶35 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was ten years younger, born in 1925, and so his early
development as a singer came during and immediately after the War. 58 For a singer,
these are the years spent finding ways of using one’s developing voice and technique to
communicate narratives and feelings in a manner that seems right for one’s time.
Normally, what seems right is likely to be fairly similar to what one hears from singers
a decade or two older than oneself. But for that to be true one needs a stable context,
both for study and early professional development, and also for a shared sense of how
music can best represent the feelings of people around one. It’s hard to imagine how
anyone with the slightest ability to empathise—and one can hardly be an engaging
singer without it—could grow up as a performer in Germany during the last years of the
War and the first of the Allied Occupation, and sing as if nothing had happened. For a
thoughtful young singer the naive expression of poetic emotion, in which Lehmann,
Schumann, Schlusnus excelled, would have been almost impossible. The context surely
demanded a new understanding of music’s ability to evoke unease (at least).

¶36 If we want to understand Fischer-Dieskau’s very characteristic performance style,

that’s one factor to consider. Another, of course, is the voice itself. Because a voice
develops not just on its own, but in relation to the sounds a singer needs to make, one
can’t entirely separate it out from everything else. But even so it seems safe to say that
Fischer-Dieskau’s voice favoured drama and dark emotions because of its exceptional
dynamic range from quiet and dull (upper partials cut right down) to very loud and
bright, in either case with evenly attenuated harmonics from bottom to top, which
makes it sound rich and smooth, but also capable of sudden change within a wide range
of colour and dynamic. Much of this would have been developed through training and
preference, and preference is certainly a prime factor in his very well-known taste for
what Walter Legge called ‘his Aussprache beim singen [pronunciation in singing], the
Prussian exaggeration of consonants’, which, Legge said, slightly irritated him, as it has
many others. 59 Their variety is fascinating: long drawn-out consonants, both at the starts
and ends of words, allow him to linger over the ideas those words represent, sometimes
eerily, sometimes longingly, but always suggesting that more is to be read into them
than one might think; explosive consonants give words the force of irresistible energy or
a ruthless command. At the same time, the colour and character of his voice can vary
from seductively female (lower harmonics only, slides into and out of significant words,
consonants almost silent) to overwhelmingly alpha male (every harmonic so strongly
present that the upper partials are a blizzard of noise, acoustically barely distinguishable
from consonants). All these effects, it’s easy to see, borrow from the sounds of speech
that carry these connotations. To extend Legge’s phrase, Fischer-Dieskau declaims
through his singing, at the same time bringing deeper and often more disturbing
meanings to the words and music than singers of an earlier generation. Consequently we
begin to perceive subtexts in songs and arias that would have been thought unseemly,
and unhealthily imaginary, before him.

¶37 Like Schwarzkopf, then, he uses speech sounds as expressive gestures, but uses
them with less innocent intent. And it cannot possibly be coincidence that over the next
twenty years, as Fischer-Dieskau becomes accepted as the gold-standard of Lieder
singing, writers begin to find deeper meanings in song texts than were dreamed of by
Capell, or Henschel, or Lehmann. Let’s take an example. For Lotte Lehmann, writing in
1945, Schubert’s ‘Am Feierabend’ should end with passionate impatience, ‘the
impatience’, she says, ‘of one in love, which causes the bystander some quiet
amusement’, giving way in the final bars to ‘dreamy yearning’. 60 The listener, in other
words, sees the story for what it appears to be, a touching instance of youthful ardour.
For Fischer-Dieskau, in his own book in 1971, writing for a culture in which Freud was
now ingrained, the energetic music ‘expresses the lad’s fanatical desire for work’, the
return of that music at the end gives the piece ‘psychological depth which clearly goes
far beyond the poet’s intentions’, and the final bars express ‘not only weariness, but also
a deep yearning.’ 61 See how Lehmann’s ‘dreamy yearning’ has become ‘deep’ here:
everything about this music has been ratcheted up a notch, a wide notch.

¶38 And that’s exactly what we hear in Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings of ‘Am

Feierabend’: already in 1951 (Sound File 18 (wav file)) featuring powerful contrasts
(the descriptions of female/male sounds above is based on this recording); 62 by 1971
(again with Moore, and there had been another with him in the interim), the sounds are
still more varied, evocative of a wider range of shifting emotions, emphasised by skilful
use of the microphone which can bring moments of intimacy and of distance in
unpredictably shifting patterns. 63 And it’s from the early 70s on, once Fischer-
Dieskau’s view of Schubert, sounding on record and described in his book, had come to
seem normal, a model even, that we begin to find commentators speaking more often
about Schubert songs in terms of drama and psychological disturbance. For Graham
Johnson ‘Am Feierabend’ shows the miller’s boy sealing himself off ‘into his own
world of fantasy and longing’, his mood shifting from ‘moonstruck fantasy’ to
‘frustration’, the song as a whole characterised by ‘healthy physical activity combined
with unhealthily suppressed feeling’ (this in the liner notes to a recording in which the
retired Fischer-Dieskau appears as a speaker, photographed giving Johnson the benefit
of his experience). 64 It’s conceptually still some way from here to Lawrence Kramer’s
recent view of the miller boy as a masochist and ‘Am Feierabend’ as wish-fulfilling
fantasy, the miller’s daughter, later in the song, ‘abolishing her father by reenacting his
music in an emotionalized, dephallicized, ambiguous form’, as Kramer says. 65 But
could we have got there without a previous performance tradition in which
psychologised readings seemed essential?

¶39 We see especially clearly here something that may well be common, perhaps the
norm: changes in musical performance style cause changes in the way listeners and then
writers understand the music. For a popular, widely-performed repertory (the situation
with new or rediscovered music may be different), conceptions of what composers’
work meant can hardly be kept separate from how the music sounds in concert and
especially on record. And in general the influence is going to be from performers to
critics, not the other way round, both because it’s easier for performance style to change
unnoticed—we’ll see why in chapter 7—so that critics don’t even realise they’re being
influenced, and also because on the whole critics listen to more performances than
performers read academic books; and this is especially true now that we have
recordings.

¶40 Fischer-Dieskau represents a particularly strong instance of this. His influence has
been extraordinary not just because he had a remarkable voice, but also because he
thought about texts and their musical settings in a way that reflected with unusual
sensitivity currents in thinking about the emotions, and especially thinking influenced
by psychoanalysis. Given his background and his intelligence that’s hardly surprising;
but one needs to see it working together with general trends in performance style away
from expressivity achieved through pitch (portamento) and timing (rubato) towards
expressivity through declamation and dynamics. A singer with a wide range of power
and colour, a period-style inviting him to explore just those features for their expressive
potential, a disposition to see the dramatic and dark side of the pieces he sang, and an
interest in psychological understanding of human behaviour (which a thoughtful
German of his generation could hardly avoid), would be someone with the power and
motivation to change radically the way singing developed.

¶41 Fischer-Dieskau is exceptional, of course, but fascinating for the clarity with which
he enables us to see the complex interactions of factors that bring about performance
style change: voice, personality, historical and intellectual context with all that it
implies for the ways people tend to think about communication and the expression of
feeling, the performance style of his immediate predecessors (the Schwarzkopf rather
than the Lehmann generation in this case), musical performance depends on the
interactions of all these, and it’s hard to say that any of them plays a less important role
than another.

¶42 There was another factor that affected performance style after the Second War, and
it’s been much discussed in recent years with good reason, 66 and I’ve already hinted at
it above. It’s recording itself. The general thrust of recent discussion of the influence of
recording on performance has been that recording tended to flatten out the variation that
once existed between styles of performance practised in different countries. When
recording began, singing by Germans was very different from singing by the French or
Italians; orchestras, usually because of different traditions of wind instrument building
and playing, also sounded considerably different; and so those national traditions could
be heard also in solo playing. There was diversity, in other words, and as its influence
spread recording began to even all this out, so that by the latter part of the 20th century
orchestras sounded almost identical, save for a few local traditions deliberately
maintained, and singers sounded much more alike than they used to: ‘international
opera’ was now so much the norm that even Germans in Verdi or Italians in Wagner
raised few eyebrows.

¶43 It’s become the tendency in recent years, among writers on the history of
performance, to regret this homogenisation, which seems very fair. 67 But I’d like to
suggest that what’s really happened is not quite so straightforward, nor so regrettable,
sad as is the loss of a diversity of national traditions. We’ll examine this more closely in
chapter 7, when we draw out of the discussions of performances in this and the next two
chapters some conclusions about style change. For now it’s enough to suggest that the
continuing development of style is itself a form of evolution that introduces fresh
approaches to interpretation and fresh meanings to compositions as it renews
performance from generation to generation. It’s not at all clear that we should regret
that. It inevitably involves losing other approaches along the way, but it’s going to take
a lot more than 100 years before we can confidently say that in the medium to longer
term anything is declining.

¶44 One thing that recording has undoubtedly caused—and again we can hear it
happening—is a trend towards the literal performance of scores. Sometimes this is
described as greater accuracy, but whether it’s any more accurate to be literal is a
question that takes us unhelpfully back to ontology and the composer’s intentions. So
let’s just say more literal. For singers and string players that means less portamento, less
rubato, less ornamentation; for pianists it means synchronising the hands so as to play
all the notes of a chord together, playing in stricter time, and forgoing doubling notes
and the elaboration of scales and arpeggios—removing, in other words, all the things
that musicians used to do as a matter of course in order to intensify the expressivity of a
performance. As in so many other respects, the post-War generation marks a watershed
in these habits too.

¶45 So if we look at the generation of singers born ten years or so after Fischer-
Dieskau—for example Janet Baker and Elly Ameling, both born in 1933; Peter Schreier
and Nigel Rogers, born 1935; Arleen Auger, born 1939—we can easily see how the
pursuit of perfection led to performances that were increasingly regular in all their
dimensions. And this is probably why the speech-influenced expressivity of
Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau was not much developed by their successors.
Although Peter Schreier was a striking exception, using whispers and semi-spoken
syllables at moments of particular intensity, on the whole the generation born in the
1930s cut down on extra-musical sounds, relying instead on vibrato and intensity to do
most of their expressive work. For particularly evocative words and moments in a score
Janet Baker still uses the occasional portamento (especially in opera) and shapes
dynamics and timbre; but evenness and consistency of sound and manner are the norm,
avoiding anything that might stand out from its surroundings and—the horror of every
modern record producer—draw attention to itself on repeated hearing. Beauty of sound
and line—those characteristics of very early recorded singing—again become the main
focus for attention, albeit for quite different reasons now.

¶46 Arleen Auger is especially interesting because she changed style in the 1980s by
cutting down her vibrato and narrowing her expressive range in order to conform to the
ideals of the ‘historically informed performance’ (HIP) movement. The difference is
encapsulated in her two recordings of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, in 1978
with Walter Olbertz, and in 1990 with Lambert Orkis playing a fortepiano, 68 and the
comparison shows particularly clearly that HIP was, for singers at any rate, no more
than a continuation of trends evident for decades: more literal performance of the
notation, a tendency to regard anything, even vibrato, as an ‘imposition’ (a much
favoured criticism at the time) on the score, and the score to be identified (save for
documented conventions of ornamentation or notes inégales) with the composer’s
intentions. Auger had to make relatively few modifications to her way of singing in
order to work with a fortepiano according to (modern) period norms, because as a child
of her time she was already singing in a much plainer fashion than her predecessors. 69
In a sense, the taste for imitation boy sopranos which began in England with Emma
Kirkby in the mid-70s is only a further intensification of the same trend, narrowing the
sound still further, maintaining constant speeds and dynamics and the most even tone
possible: modernism in sound, you might say, 70 and very late in the day.

¶47 Among the many fascinating aspects of the HIP phenomenon was that it was
probably the first occasion in the history of music when a change of style was
intentionally manufactured by performers and widely adopted. Indeed it was so
successful that it came to dominate several generations of musicians in an increasingly
wide repertory. 71 It was a change that could never have happened without recording and
the dissemination of style that it encouraged, but even so it conforms to the general
principles of style change that we’ve been seeing, away from expression through
modifying pitch and timing, towards expression through dynamics and articulation.
We’ll look at it in more detail in a moment when we examine string playing. Among
singers—and Auger illustrates this very well—the characteristics of HIP were much less
marked. Learning to play an instrument that behaves significantly differently from its
modern descendant is not easy, although it is at least possible to continue the old way in
order to make a living while learning the new. Only a very few singers are adaptable
enough to do that—you can’t just pick up the other voice and take it to the appropriate
concert—so that on the whole singers had no choice but to be ‘early music’ or
‘mainstream’. At the time Auger was an exception, but one who showed that
mainstream and early music styles were not as far apart in their general attitude to sound
and score as their advocates tended to imagine.

¶48 The last few years of the 20th century saw these distinctions blurred, first because of
the mainstream’s increasing tendency to sound HIP, and second because within HIP
there began to appear the first signs of a re-emergence of expressive singing, which
continues at the time of writing (2005). This, without much doubt, is also happening
partly under the influence of recordings, but this time recordings from the past, the
flood of reissues that have appeared from record companies struggling to cut costs by
using their back catalogue instead of new issues, creating and developing a taste for pre-
War performance. What used to be tasteless, self-indulgent and over-the-top now begins
to seem ideally expressive once again.

¶49 There’s a nice (and early) example in a 1996 recording of Messiah conducted by
Paul McCreesh, using period instruments articulating sighing note-pairs in the neatest
neo-baroque fashion, in which Bernarda Fink sings ‘He was despised’ with elaborate
Handelian ornamentation and yet with a sound and with an intensity of expression,
shaped by dynamics and rubato, that could have been made in the heyday of the
massed-choir performances. Compare it to Jennifer Vivyan under Sir Thomas Beecham
in 1949—the recording with cymbals and trombones in the Halleluja chorus—and
you’ll see where in terms of vocal expressivity it belongs. And it works. 72 As we saw in
chapter 2, music is extraordinarily flexible: styles that we imagine to be polar opposites
can mix. Given enough time, musicians ensure that they do.

¶50 What have we learnt so far about performance style? It’s intimately bound up with
expressivity. Expressivity, in turn, is achieved by changes in sound from moment to
moment, over and above those demanded by the composer, chosen by the performer.
What makes a style is that the options performers choose for being expressive are
relatively consistent within a performance, within the work of a performer, and within a
geographical locale (though this is less the case now, thanks to recordings) and within a
period of time (this may be more true now than before, it’s hard to tell). So on the one
hand, expressivity in the western art tradition is fundamental to music-making; it’s what
makes musical performance musical. Yet on the other, over time it changes. To make
sense of this paradox we’ll have to bring more factors into the equation. Although I’ve
provided many hints in the discussion of singing styles as to how expressivity works,
and why it changes, we’re not going to start to understand the mechanisms through
which it works on us as listeners until we’ve looked in more detail at the analysis of
expressive gestures in chapter 8. But before we go there it will be helpful to see how
expressivity differs in other kinds of instruments.

¶51 In some ways instruments are easier to deal with. They tend to work expressively in
fewer musical dimensions; for example, strings can vary pitch, intensity and time, like
voices, but have somewhat less control over timbre and, of course, no text. A piano can
vary intensity and time, timbre only to a very limited extent, and frequency not at all. A
harpsichord can change time, but not much else, which makes it an extremely good
instrument for studying rubato and articulation. A flute can vary intensity and time,
timbre somewhat, and pitch slightly. And so on. By making careful choices, it will be
possible for researchers to make progress in understanding musical performance under
reasonably controlled conditions simply by focusing on contrasting instruments. And in
that case it may seem perverse to start with singing, which is so variable and so much
shaped by singers’ responses to a text. But in fact the text is invaluable because it gives
us a way of understanding what expressive gestures are there to signal. We’ll make
much more use of this in chapter 8. For now, though, let’s take a closer look at violin
playing and at piano playing, to see how their styles changed during the past 100 years,
and how they relate to and differ from singing styles. That will give us a broad enough
view of musical expressivity for us to move on, in subsequent chapters, to look for ways
of understanding how it works.

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Footnotes

1.
HMV 043202, matrix ac5112f (rec. 30 June 1911), transferred at 78.2rpm from
a vinyl pressing of the HMV metal stamper. Special thanks to Roger Beardsley
for allowing me to use this track. Back to context...
2.
Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Record Guide
(London: Collins, 1951; 2nd rev. ed., 1955): (1955), 529. For a well-earned
appreciation of The Record Guide see Robin Holloway, ‘Purple patches’ in The
Spectator, December 29th, 2001. I am most grateful to Timothy Day for sending
me this. Back to context...
3.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, ‘The recordings of Elena Gerhardt’, The Record
Collector 32 (1987), 176-82 at 178. The same issue contains a biography by
Linda Austwick and a discography by Alan Kelly and Ian Cosens. Back to
context...
4.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000005GTK/104-
7702402-6823950?v=glance , accessed 30 March 2005, since moved to
http://www.amazon.com/review/R24KJVL5WOGZRD/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#
R24KJVL5WOGZRD (accessed 22 November 2008). Back to context...
5.
I’ve not surveyed orchestral playing partly because that’s been so well done by
Robert Philip (1992); partly too because it is about the worst place to begin if
(applying the particular focus of this book) one is interested in understanding
small details of performance expressivity, there being too many different sounds
and too many performers potentially responsible for any one of them. An
excellent commentary on the whole field of 20th-century performance on record
is the third chapter of Day (2000), 142-98. Back to context...
6.
Ridley (2004), chapter 3, ‘Expression’, esp. 98-102. Back to context...
7.
See also Patrik N. Juslin, ‘Cue utilization in communication of emotion in music
performance: relating performance to perception’, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26 (2000), 1797-813. Back to
context...
8.
I say ‘with sound’ because for the most part I don’t deal with technique, that’s to
say how performers make the sound. I regard this as a serious shortcoming of
this book, but I am competent to discuss it for only one of the instruments I
discuss here and it’s not the voice. For a path-breaking treatment of the
relationship between singers’ technique and sound see Plack (2008), which
(although these two were written independently) could be read as a
complementary study. Back to context...
9.
The most detailed description of Gaisberg’s travels is in Moore (1999). Back to
context...
10.
See also the discussion of Hess and Henschel’s re-recordings in chapter 3. Back
to context...
11.
See, for example, Will Crutchfield, ‘Vocal Ornamentation in Verdi: The
Phonographic Evidence’, 19th-Century Music 7 (1983), 3-54; John Potter,
‘Beggar at the door: the rise and fall of portamento in singing’, Music & Letters
87 (2006), 523-50; Robert Toft, ‘Rendering the sense more conspicuous:
 grammatical and rhetorical principles of vocal phrasing in art and popular/jazz
music’, Music & Letters 85 (2004), 368-87. Back to context...
12.
However, for an argument from evolution that seems to favour slower change
before modern times see Leech-Wilkinson, in Cook et al. (forthcoming 2009).
Back to context...
13.
The best discussions of Patti’s recordings are by Michael Scott in the booklet
accompanying the CD set, ‘The Complete Adelina Patti and Victor Maurel’,
Marston Records 50211 (issued 1998), and Michael Aspinall in the booklet
accompanying the vinyl 78rpm set, ‘Adelina Patti Recordings: 78rpm vinyl
recordings from original masters’, Historic Masters HM 500/7 (issued 2006).
John Potter provides a commentary on her ‘Voi che sapete’ in Potter (2006),
536-7. There are valuable comments on aspects of her performance style in
David Milsom, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Violin
Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Back to context...
14.
The importance of knowing the age of a recorded voice is stressed in Plack
(2008) 6-7, 104. See also her analysis of Schlusnus’s aging voice, 85-104. The
point made on p. 104 is especially worth bearing in mind: because of the effects
of aging, ‘With singers in particular, comparing an early recording made by one
performer with a late recording made by another may result in inaccurate
conclusions.’ Back to context...
15.
Hanslick on Patti (writing in 1879): ‘infallible purity of her intonation’ (188), ‘a
silver-clear genuine soprano, it is wonderfully pure and distinct’ (195), ‘the
silver-clear impact of this infallible voice’ (201), ‘light silvery voice’ (203), ‘the
crystal-clear sound of her voice’ (207). (Eduard Hanslick: Vienna’s Golden
Years of Music, 1850-1900, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants (London: Gollancz,
1951)). Wolf on Patti (in 1886): ‘True, the tones pour forth silvery clear from
the diva throat, but only on the level terrain of the middle voice’. (Ed. and trans.
Henry Pleasants, The Music Criticism of Hugo Wolf (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1979), 178. On Muzio see Aspinall (2006), 8. Back to context...
16.
Emma Eames, Some Memories and Reflections (New York, 1927), quoted in
Aspinall (2006), 4. Back to context...
17.
Aspinall (2006), 6. Back to context...
18.
Aspinall (2006), 4, 8. Back to context...
19.
As Hanslick also noted: ‘Always rhythmically strict as regards measures, she
treats the rhythm within each measure with individual freedom...’ (Hanslick
(1951), 203.) Back to context...
20.
I am grateful to Amy Blier-Carruthers for educating me on the history of the
scoop. Back to context...
21.
Marston 52011, disc 2, track 7; Symposium 1324, track 25; Nimbus NI 7841,
track 5. Back to context...
22.
EMI Centenary Edition, disc 1, 5 66183 2, track 25. Back to context...
23.
‘Adelina Patti Recordings: 78rpm vinyl recordings from original masters’,
Historic Masters HM 507A (including a CD transfer by Roger Beardsley); ‘The
Complete Adelina Patti and Victor Maurel’, Marston MR 52011, disc 2, track 3.
Back to context...
24.
‘The Record of Singing’ [vol. 1], EMI RLS 724, disc 1, band 2. Back to
context...
25.
The best discussion of speeds for Patti discs is by Jeffrey Miller and Ward
Marston in the booklet accompanying Marston Records 50211. Back to
context...
26.
Trans. as Donald V. Paschke. A complete treatise on the art of singing…by
Manuel Garcia II (New York: Da Capo, 1984 (Part I), 1975 (Part II)). For
Klein’s summary see William Moran, Herman Klein and the Gramophone, esp.
25-44. For modern discussion of Garcia, and especially his teaching on
portamento, see Potter (2006), 528-33. Back to context...
27.
For further discussion see Potter (2006) and especially Plack (2008). Back to
context...
28.
Michael Scott, The Record of Singing (London: Duckworth, 1977; also issued as
the ‘booklet’ accompanying RLS 724), 52, quoting Eduard Hanslick, Music
Criticisms 1846-99, translated Henry Pleasants (rev. ed., Harmondsworth,
1963), 269. Back to context...
29.
There is a useful study of Santley in Graham Oakes, ‘Sir Charles Santley’, The
Record Collector 34 (1989), 167-76. See also the letter on ‘Playing-speeds of
Santley’s records’ from Michael Aspinall, The Record Collector 36 (1991), 134-
5. Aspinall’s opinion is that ‘Non più andrai’ should be played at 69rpm. Back
to context...
30.
Santley’s portamento in this recording is also discussed by Milsom, (2003), 87-
8. Back to context...
31.
Metfessel (1932), 62-5, shows how closely related are vibrato and trill,
physically and in terms of production, even though perceptually they can be
differentiated. Back to context...
32.
His only commercial recording as a conductor, of Beethoven’s first symphony
with the Royal Philharmonic, is included on the Cheyne CD reissue discussed in
chapter 3: CHE 44379. Back to context...
33.
Helen Henschel, When Soft Voices Die: A musical biography (London:
Westhouse, 1944), 130. Plack (2008), 120-2, however, is more struck by
Henschel’s emphasis on the importance of consonants. Henschel’s
autobiography is fascinating and amusing: Musings & Memories of a Musician
 (London: Macmillan, 1918). Back to context...
34.
Extracts from the following discussion were used in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
'Portamento and musical meaning', Journal of Musicological Research 25
(2006) 233-61 at 251ff, and in a previous paper (cited there). Back to context...
35.
Richard Capell, Schubert’s Songs (London: Benn, 1928), 282. Appendix III,
‘Gramophone Records’, was only included in this first edition. Capell specifies
the Columbia recording perhaps because the single-sided HMV was by then
hard to find and lacked ‘Der Leiermann’. Back to context...
36.
‘Das Wandern’: Matrix (W)A6893-1, rec. 2 March 1928, issued on Columbia D
1657. Back to context...
37.
Capell (1928), 191. Back to context...
38.
‘Der Leiermann’: matrix (W)A6892-3, rec. 2 Mar 1928, issued on Columbia D
1657. Back to context...
39.
Capell (1928), 239. Back to context...
40.
The construction of Capell’s view is illuminated by David Gramit in
'Constructing a Victorian Schubert: music, biography, and cultural values’, 19 th
-Century Music 17 (1993), 65-78, esp. at 77. Back to context...
41.
For another example of this phenomenon, on a large scale, see Dorottya Fabian,
Bach Performance Practice, 1945-1975 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Back to
context...
42.
For further discussion of this relationship see Leech-Wilkinson (2006b). Back to
context...
43.
On Lehmann’s vocal style see also Walter Legge in Schwarzkopf (2002), 129-
30. Back to context...
44.
There is a good Lotte Lehmann discography at
http://lottelehmann.org/llf/lehmann/discography/index.html. Back to context...
45.
Rebecca Plack sets Lehmann’s voice alongside Elisabeth Schumann’s and
contrasts both with pupils of Louis Bachner, including Sigrid Onegin, Frida
Leider, Ria Ginster and Heinrich Schlusnus. Lehmann and Schumann she relates
to a manner of singing that privileges emotional response to individual words
and images, while the others, and singers like them, are expressive rather at the
level of the phrase, paying more attention to beautiful sound and legato, what
Plack calls singing ‘on the breath’. In this sense perhaps they continue and
develop the tradition of Patti and Henschel. Plack’s discussion is informed by
her understanding of voice production and in many ways seems to call for a
more nuanced survey of changing performance styles than I have offered here.
Plack (2008), esp. 38-71. Back to context...
46.
 Walter Legge’s warts-and-all appreciation of Lehmann is reprinted in
Schwarzkopf (2002). Back to context...
47.
For another example see Lilli Lehmann, How to Sing [Meine Gesangkunst],
trans. Richard Aldrich (New York: Macmillan, 1902) section 38 (36 in later
editions), ‘Interpretation’. Back to context...
48.
Lotte Lehmann, More than Singing: the interpretation of songs, (New York:
Boosey & Hawkes, 1945; repr. New York: Dover, 1985), 145. Back to context...
49.
‘Lotte Lehmann reading German lyric poetry’, Caedmon TC 1072, side 1, band
3, 3’17” – 4’11” (issued 1957). Back to context...
50.
Matrix (W) (£) Be 9044, rec. 19 June 1930, issued on Parlophone RO 20185.
Transferred at 80rpm. Back to context...
51.
For a detailed treatment of Schlusnus as Lieder singer see also Plack (2008), esp.
83-104. Back to context...
52.
There is a fascinating study waiting to be written about the gender differences in
singers’ performance styles before the Second World War, taking account of
every aspect of expressivity. Back to context...
53.
Accompanied Franz Rupp, matrix 1604½ bk 1 (rec. ca. June 1928), issued on
Brunswick 85004, DGG 62848, & Polydor 62644. For an appreciation of
Schlusnus’s recordings including a discography see Michael Seil and Christian
Zwarg, ‘Heinrich Schlusnus (1888-1952)’, The Record Collector 47 (2002), 82-
137. Back to context...
54.
Karen Brecht, ‘In the Aftermath of Nazi-Germany: Alexander Mitscherlich and
Psychoanalysis Legend and Legacy’, American Imago, 52.3 (1995) 291-312.
Back to context...
55.
Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylor (1955), 749. Back to context...
56.
In John Steane’s words, ‘In some sense, ‘Schwarzkopf’ was a creation’. (John
Steane, Singers of the Century (London: Duckworth, 1996), 13.) Back to
context...
57.
Sackville-West & Shawe-Taylor (1951), 529, 578; (1955), 529, esp. 670, 674,
and passim on older singers, always preferred. Back to context...
58.
For an excellent discussion of Fischer-Dieskau, with his difference from
preceding singers related to his biography, see Potter (2006), 545-7. Much of the
following appeared also in Leech-Wilkinson (2006), 254-7. Back to context...
59.
Legge in Schwarzkopf (2002), 88. Back to context...
60.
Lotte Lehmann, Eighteen Song Cycles: studies in their interpretation (London:
Cassell, [1971]), 24. Back to context...
61.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert’s Songs: a biographical study, English
translation by Kenneth A. Whitton (New York: Knopf, 1976; first German
edition, Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1971), 178. Back to context...
62.
Matrix 2EA_15959-1C (rec. 3 October 1951), issued on HMV DB 21389. For
readers with Sonic Visualiser already installed Data File 12 (sv file) shows
Fischer-Dieskau’s male and female voices very clearly. Back to context...
63.
‘Franz Schubert, Lieder’, DG 437 214–2, vol. III, disc 1(437 236–2), track 5.
Back to context...
64.
‘The Hyperion Schubert Edition’, vol. 25, Hyperion CDJ33025, issued 1996,
booklet pp. 17-9. Back to context...
65.
Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140. Back to context...
66.
Esp. Philip (2004), Katz (2004). For another and clearer case see Erika Brady, A
Spiral Way: how the phonograph changed ethnography (Jackson, MS:
University of Mississippi Press, 1999). Sterne (2003) argues that recording
transformed cultural attitudes to sound. Back to context...
67.
The strongest and most eloquent statement to this effect is Philip 2004 (passim
but esp. 231-52) which shows just how much variety has indeed been lost. But
see also Dorottya Fabian, ‘Is diversity in musical performance truly in decline?
The evidence of sound recordings’, Context 31 (2006), 165-80. Back to
context...
68.
With Walter Olbertz: ‘Franz Schubert: Goethe Lieder’, Brilliant 99448, track 1
(no date); with Lambert Orkis: ‘Schubert: Lieder, Winterreise’, 2-CD set, Virgin
Classics 5 61457 2, disc 1, track 1, issued 1991. Back to context...
69.
For more detailed discussion of a HIP Auger performance, of Schubert’s ‘Die
junge Nonne’, see Leech-Wilkinson (2007), 225-30. Back to context...
70.
In line with Leech-Wilkinson (1984) and Taruskin esp. (1988). Back to
context...
71.
On the development of HIP see outstandingly Fabian (2003). For a plea that the
musicians who led HIP deserve more credit for their achievement than does the
historical past see Leech-Wilkinson, review of Walls (2003) in Music & Letters
86 (2005), 114-116 at 116. Back to context...
72.
McCreesh: DG Archiv 453 464-2, disc 1, track 21; Beecham: CD reissue on
RCA Victor Gold Seal 09026-61266-2, disc 2, track2. Back to context...
©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, England, United Kingdom.
Tel +44 (
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

5. Changing Performance Styles: Violin playing

¶1 It’s a surprisingly short step from voice to violin, as writers on violin technique have
repeatedly noted. The comparison makes especially clear the similarity, which I’ll be
discussing in chapter 8, between expressivity in singing and in instrumental playing. As
David Milsom has pointed out, 19th-century violin teachers habitually referred students
to vocal technique for models, and one can hear the similarity of approach in many early
recordings. 1 We saw how from Patti to Lehmann a relatively ‘natural’ sound, in which
vibrato, rubato and portamento are all used but are subservient to continuity and
flexibility of line, developed into a much more overt emotionalism via heavier and more
continuous vibrato, rubato that favoured ritardandi at climatic moments, swoops up to
the most significant notes and words, and more dramatic use of dynamics. Similarly in
violin playing a relatively plain style that we hear first in recordings of Joachim, using
noticeable vibrato only occasionally for emphasis, frequent minor rubato, and light but
frequent portamento, seems at first glance to have given way through the 1920s and 30s
to a style, typical of Kreisler, Heifetz, Elman and their contemporaries, that depended
for its greater emphasis on continuous vibrato, heavier rubato at crucial moments,
slower portamento, and emphasis through dynamic accents. How these, and other styles,
are tied together over time we’ll consider later on, after we’ve looked at pianists as well.
But first let’s look at examples of developments in 20th-century violin playing and
compare them with singers. 2

Joseph Joachim

¶2 Joseph Joachim, born in 1831, was three years older than Santley, and so was in his
early 70s when he recorded in 1903. He had studied in Vienna in the late 1830s and
early 40s, and then with Mendelssohn, later working with Liszt and most famously with
Brahms, whose violin concerto was written for him. How he played is therefore of some
historical interest, and for anyone whose notion of Romantic playing involves surging
crescendi and heavy vibrato it’s rather surprising. 3 First of all, there is by our standards
almost no vibrato; what there is is very light and used most noticeably on longer notes.
Portamento is used but mainly in pathetic passages, expressing character, not as a
routine means of getting around the instrument. Rubato has two functions; at the level
of the beat it is used only when it contributes to characterisation, marking the difference
between more forceful (faster) and more pathetic passages (slower); from note to note,
however, it is used continuously, stressing (by lengthening) notes of structural
importance within a phrase, so that, for example, scales tend to be fast but may linger on
melodically or harmonically significant pitches. In these senses Joachim’s playing is not
unlike the more expressive end of modern HIP. But Joachim has a much wider range of
sounds and styles than is common today. His Bach playing is extremely clean and
highly articulated, with very narrow and rather uneven vibrato on the long notes only
(suggesting, though, that it might have been common in more reflective music); his
Brahms (Joachim’s arrangement of two of the Hungarian Dances nos. 1 & 2) adopts a
gipsy-style rubato; in his own Romanze he uses far more portamento to bring out the
sentimental character of the composition. In other words, Joachim’s performance style
varies in order to emphasise his notion of the composition style, something that
happened much less in subsequent generations. To us his Bach playing may sound
HIP—and he uses largely gut strings, as was still the norm—but his Brahms uses the
Tourte bow to attack chords with passion, and his Joachim is as sentimental as anything
from the 1920s. 4 Some of these differences must have been evened out by the
insensitivity of the recording technology—his relatively consistent loudness throughout
may be misleading, therefore—but that so much comes through only emphasises just
how powerful and varied his playing must have been. Later 20th-century playing would
have seemed monochrome by comparison. 5

¶3 Milsom has made a number of useful comparisons between Joachim and Patti, 6 and
indeed they have much in common in their limited and targeted use of vibrato,
portamento and rubato; but one could equally appropriately compare Joachim to Santley
or Henschel, or other early recorded singers who have left more powerful performances,
for example Lilli Lehmann (b. 1848). The unbroken melodic continuity managed so
well by Patti is there in Joachim’s Romanze but totally foreign to his Bach, and for a
vocal analogue to his Brahms one would need to look to the most forceful operatic
singing of his time. Equally, his attention to the character of the composition and the
range of expressive approaches he takes as a result has no space for the consistency of
expressive language that settled on violin playing as vibrato became continuous and
universal over the next two decades. Responsiveness to changing characters was crucial,
but it’s above all his very limited vibrato that separates him out from violin playing over
the next 70 years and that it’s so tempting to suppose was characteristic of his
unrecorded predecessors.

¶4 This isn’t the place to try to determine what caused the change in vibrato at the
beginning of the 20th century. There has already been much argument about it and,
given its importance and the lack of definitive evidence, it’s a safe bet that
musicologists will continue to worry over it for a long time to come. Judging by written
evidence from the 19th century (usefully summarised in Milsom 2003) and by the
earliest recordings, among which Joachim’s are crucial, it seems that vibrato changed
from being one expressive technique among many, used to different extents by different
players and only prominently at moments of greater intensity, to become a fundamental
feature of string technique used by everyone all the time—that is to say, on almost
every note that was long enough for a finger or wrist to shake and that was not an open
string. 7 It is very unusual for so significant a change in style to happen so quickly, and
it’s hardly surprising that many are looking to understand why.

¶5 While recognising that taste may have played a part, Mark Katz has proposed that
the main engine of vibrato change was the introduction of recording. Certainly the
coincidence of dates is intriguing. He offers a number of reasons, none of which is in
itself decisive. But a single cause seems wholly unlikely: a coincidence of tendencies
seems far more probable, and Katz offers a fair number. First, as singers discovered
towards the end of the 19th century, vibrato helps to distinguish a solo line from its
accompaniment. Singers, of course, were finding out how to project over increasingly
large orchestras in ever larger opera houses, and they modified the colour of their voice
as well, developing formants specific to trained singing. Violinists had less occasion for
standing out from the crowd, though one could perhaps argue that concerto playing
required a more forthright style than it had when orchestras and venues were smaller.
But Katz’s argument is that violins registered better in early recordings when vibrato
was wider and continuous. Secondly, it covered over bowing noise that became audible
once electrical recording was introduced in 1925 (though this is of course an argument
about a later period). Thirdly, vibrato disguised poor intonation. How poor soloists’
intonation was around 1900 it’s hard to tell—there aren’t enough recordings to support
much generalisation—but while there are polite reasons for not supposing it any worse
than now, there really is so much imprecise orchestral playing on early records that it’s
tempting to suppose that standards were at least different. So, although it’s not an
attractive argument for continuous vibrato, Katz may have a point. Fourthly, (this is
actually Katz’s third point, but I’ve separated out his second argument into two) Katz
points to the lack of the visual dimension, which to early listeners at home must have
seemed so peculiar, and he sees continuous vibrato as a way of indicating an emotional
engagement that listeners could no longer gauge from facial expression and bodily
gesture. Fifthly, Katz suggests that violinists may have placed more weight on vibrato
because it gave them a means of differentiating their own sound from anyone else’s. 8 A
counter-argument might be that violinists still use continuous vibrato but never tire of
arguing that nowadays everyone sounds the same. 9 There’s no doubt, though, that in the
early decades of continuous vibrato they didn’t; so again Katz may well have a point.

¶6 On the other hand, the dates don’t really work: the change had already happened
before recording began. Only in the oldest performers, born before 1850, do we hear the
old style. Among younger players it was already disappearing, and the generation born
after 1870 used it not at all. That generation would have developed their own personal
styles in the 1890s before commercial recording began, and long before recordings
became common enough to influence players (which I would think was not until at least
the 1920s). The more conventional explanation for the new more demonstrative style,
that orchestras had become larger and louder and so ways had to be found for soloists to
penetrate through these bigger sound textures, may be good enough, but without
recorded evidence covering the change we can’t know for sure.

Fritz Kreisler

¶7 No doubt much more will be said on this subject over the next few years. For us it’s
probably enough simply to observe what the recordings seem to tell us, which is that
already at the start of the 20th century, although older players like Joachim, as with
singers like Patti, tended not to use much vibrato, younger players were already using it
all the time. Fritz Kreisler is always cited as the father of continuous vibrato, 10 and
while his recordings certainly offer very clear examples of its early use, it seems very
unlikely that the cause can have been so simple. And indeed when we listen to a wider
range of early recorded players it quickly becomes clear that there was an increasing use
of vibrato by the generation that followed Joachim’s; 11 the differences, however, are
nothing like as striking as some discussions have suggested.
 Table 1

¶8 Table 1 sets out some rough figures for rate (speed) and extent (width) in a
chronological sequence of players. 12 (The numbers were obtained by reading off the
timings and frequencies in a spectrum analysis program 13 and converting the latter into
fractions of a semitone. 14 Since there’s no practical way of measuring every cycle and
averaging them it’s not a very reliable set of numbers, depending on one’s ability to
make accurate measurements by hand, and on one’s patience to make enough of them. I
don’t make any great claims on either count, but it gives a rough idea, and I hope is
accurate enough to allow comparison later on with more modern players.) 15

¶9 Joachim’s own palette, as I’ve suggested, included a range of sounds and styles,
including light and infrequent vibrato in his Brahms playing. Leopold Auer, born in
1845, was recorded in 1920 playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Melodie’ Op. 42 no. 3 (arranged,
like other early recorded favourites, by August Wilhelmj). Of course by 1920 he may
have absorbed the manners of younger players, but when he objected strongly to
continuous vibrato in his textbook from 1921 I think we can assume that his own, which
was continuous but narrow, wasn’t the kind of vibrato he was talking about. 16 Whatever
he found objectionable, then, it’s unlikely to have been the principle of continuous
vibrato, but rather a recent practice more noticeable than his own, for example
Kreisler’s or even younger players born in the 1880s and 90s. His vibrato shows at least
the beginnings of a tendency perhaps, in fact, the continuation of a tradition. Certainly
the next generation was using light but noticeable vibrato much of the time. 17 Arnold
Rosé, born in 1863, is sometimes said to have been one of the last orchestral leaders (of
the Vienna Philharmonic) to insist on orchestral playing ‘without vibrato’; 18 but it’s
clear from his recordings that ‘without vibrato’ is a comparative, not an absolute. And
players born only a bit later use it all the time, albeit still relatively lightly; examples
include the American Maud Powell, born in 1868, and the immensely influential teacher
Carl Flesch, born in 1873.

¶10 There is one important difference, though, between the older players’ continuous
vibrato and that developed by the younger ones. Joachim, Auer, Viardot, and Rosé,
have a vibrato that varies from cycle to cycle, slightly in speed and considerably in
depth, without any apparent cause related to the composition. But in Flesch and then
Kreisler, followed by Hubermann and Heifetz, we begin to hear players varying vibrato
according to changes in emotional temperature within a phrase. At high-points
dynamics are louder and vibrato is deeper, at low points, especially phrase-ends,
dynamics and vibrato both tail off. To judge by the Violinschulen of Spohr (1832), and
later David (1864), the linking vibrato speed and loudness goes back a very long way, 19
but both authors are discussing single notes requiring special treatment, not a
continuous vibrato that varies from moment to moment as the melody changes in pitch
and loudness, which seems to be a later development. Whether this generation of
players born in the 1870s was really the first to adopt it we cannot tell without more and
earlier recordings.

¶11 Because this continuous change in vibrato extent happens in coordination with
changes in the musical surface one hardly notices it in normal listening. This is a
phenomenon comparable to perceptions of rubato: research by Bruno Repp has shown
that people do not easily notice it in conventional locations (for example phrase-ends). 20
But with visualisation tools such as spectrum analysis software (which we’ll discuss in
more detail in chapter 8) it’s much easier to see. So what strikes one above all about the
development of Kreisler’s performances as one listens to them is not so much their
flexibility coordinated with the score, but rather the way in which his vibrato becomes a
lot more even. The following images show the same note from the 1912 and the first of
the 1926 recordings of Kreisler’s Liebesleid (approx. 1’4”–1’6” into each). Sound File
19 (wav file) plays them in chronological order.

Plate 6: Kreisler's vibrato, 1912

¶12 The difference may not look great, but consider that the uneveness in the height of
the cycles in the 1912 note differ by almost the depth of half a cycle, and the depth of
the cycles themselves varies by almost the same amount, and you can see why the 1926
note sounds more regular. 21 It’s not that the uneveness is ever great enough to sound
rough on the contrary, as we’ve seen it sounds rather colourful but rather that
Kreisler seems to have developed the skill to be much more regular, and presumably
preferred the results. The downside, and of course this is a matter of opinion, is that the
sound is just a bit less interesting, a bit more mechanical and perfect, rich but
unvarying. 22

Plate 7: Kreisler's vibrato, 1926

¶13 How reliable this sort of chronological snap-shooting is as evidence for the
development of vibrato remains to be seen, of course; a much more thorough study is
required. 23 Birth date can only be one factor, and seems unlikely to be more important
than teacher, or the years and place in which a student was first exposed to a range of
other fine players. Clearly there were plenty of tendencies leading towards wider, more
even, and continuous vibrato. But we simply don’t have enough evidence to show that it
became a norm as late as the early 20th century, nor that Kreisler was responsible for its
universal adoption.

¶14 In that case, what is it about Kreisler that makes him so convenient a father-figure
for modern violin sound? He was born in 1875, which makes him somewhat younger
than any violinist mentioned so far, and hmade began to record in earnest in 1910, by
which time he already had a glowing international reputation (he gave the first
performance of Elgar’s concerto in that year). For anyone already familiar with the
Kreisler legend these early recordings come as a bit of a surprise; for, like Joachim,
Kreisler has a variable style. 24 His very first Victor recording, made on 11 May, of
Smetana’s ‘Bohemian Fantasie’ shows some of the sound that one expects from his later
recordings. 25 It’s unnaturally dull, thanks to the limitations of the relatively early
acoustic technology, but still hints at the silvery top which is so characteristic. We also
find a continuous vibrato of much the width that we hear on his later, better-known
discs. On the other hand, his Bach Gavotte (from the third partita), recorded two weeks
later on May 24, has a lighter vibrato, hardly more than Auer in Tchaikovsky and less
than Viardot or Powell, and like Joachim Kreisler doesn’t use it on the shorter notes. A
Schubert ‘Moment musical’ recorded on May 18 has very slightly more. Kreisler’s own
Liebesleid, recorded the following year, has more again, but still less than the Smetana.
26
So at first Kreisler was really not so unlike his contemporaries in so far as he
modified his use of vibrato according to his perception of the character of the piece he
was playing. (It is a character judgement he’s making, incidentally, not a historical one,
because he plays Gluck with at least as much vibrato as Smetana.) If there’s a difference
it’s that he clearly is working several notches further along a line towards continuous
wide vibrato. Nothing he plays lacks it entirely; and at its widest it’s somewhat wider
than that of his contemporaries in 1910. But it’s hard to believe that at that date he
would have seemed extraordinary simply on that account. 27 Other factors must have
been in play.

¶15 I suspect that it had to do with timbre, which is partly a function of vibrato but
contains more complex elements to do especially with pressure and speed of bowing.
The sound itself, even in these quite early acoustic recordings, is coloured in a very
particular way which does seem to mark it out from others. It sounds as if it has some
bright upper partials and a glowing middle, 28 but in fact there are no sounds recorded
above about 5000Hz on the 1910 discs, and so the only way of accounting for this effect
is through rapidly varying amplitude among the few partials that are there. Light but
very precisely controlled bowing, generating a high rate of slipping and catching of the
string by the bow, could be its cause. 29 Add to this the continuous vibrato, slightly
wider than was common, and you get a lot of movement among the partials at a level
too fast for the brain to register as anything other than an impression of liveliness in the
sound. And that is exactly what is so characteristic of Kreisler’s playing, characteristic
too of singing, and it was the vocal quality of Kreisler’s musicianship that so struck his
contemporaries. Louis Lochner, in his biography, quotes a remarkable 1908 review by
the Chicago critic W.L. Hubbard of a Kreisler concert which seems to be describing a
vocal recital until Kreisler’s name is revealed at the end. His sound, Hubbard writes, has
a low register of ‘wondrous warmth and richness, its middle portion brilliant and
vibrant, ... and its upper tone being of a clarity, a sweetness and an exquisite finesse that
ravish the sense.’ 30

¶16 The Bach double concerto recording with Efrem Zimbalist, from 1915, provides a
convenient test for our ability to hear the differences listed in Table 1. Though both
players come from broadly the same stylistic world, it’s easy to distinguish between
them by ear, without a score, because Zimbalist’s sound is duller (probably because he
bowed with higher pressure on the string) and his vibrato is noticeably slower: 4/100ths
of a second for each vibrato cycle may not seem much (and incidentally it’s extremely
approximate, not least because both players still use uneven speeds and depths) but it is
enough for us to be consciously aware of the difference.

¶17 Kreisler’s discography is huge for his time, judging by Creighton’s listing larger
than any other violinist born before 1890. 31 So it’s easy to understand why
commentators like Flesch felt that he was overwhelmingly influential: he very probably
was. But I suggest it was for more complex reasons than just his continuous vibrato. He
made a sound that, because its interesting features did not depend entirely on the higher
partials, was transmitted reasonably well on record. Nevertheless, when we get to his
electrical recordings we realise how much we’ve been missing. If you recall my
warnings in the last chapter about the kinds of things we can and cannot determine from
recordings on 78rpm shellac discs you’ll have noticed that I’ve been quite careful not to
try to talk about Kreisler’s sound in terms of the balance of the harmonics. So much
depends on the recording and the transfer. And so we need to continue to be cautious
here. The American electricals (transferred on RCA) sound much brighter than the
acoustics, and one would expect that; but they also sound thinner, the 1949 disc almost
tinny. By contrast, the HMV discs (transferred by Mark Obert-Thorn for Naxos) sound
quite different, much warmer, an altogether richer and more beautiful sound no one
could ever have expected. Which is more like Kreisler? At the moment it’s impossible
to say. The HMVs on Naxos sound more lifelike to a modern listener; but then ‘lifelike
to the modern listener’ is the aim one can reasonably expect of Obert-Thorn in making
the transfer. It’s a circular process from which there is currently no escape. That said, a
comparison of the transfers of my next example, based on (presumably) different copies
of the same issue, shows Obert-Thorn producing a far superior result to his unnamed
rival on the Symposium label, with a greater range of frequencies present and greater
clarity among the instruments. In the Kreisler case, though, we’re not comparing like
with like—the RCA and HMV discs carry different recordings. All this shows is that an
accumulation of different transfers of the same originals over time might amount to
some kind of evidence for Kreisler’s sound in so far as it was recorded on shellac. You
can see, then, why I recommend caution.

¶18 I’ve spent several pages talking about Kreisler’s sound both because it’s loomed so
large in the mythology of 20th-century violin playing, but also to show just how much
work there is still to do before we can begin to feel confident that we understand how
string playing changed in the early years of recording. It’s also allowed me to discuss
some of the aspects of sound, and ways of comparing sounds, that will be useful in
other contexts, especially when we come to look in more detail, in Chapter 8, at
expressive gestures. For the moment, though, I want to move on through the century,
taking as my examples of later violin playing a sequence of concerto performances.
Once we get into the electrical era, and orchestral pieces can be adequately recorded,
concertos begin to function as the shop window for violinists, and we can think of them
as offering fair displays of each player’s style. 32

Changing vibrato

¶19 It’s helpful to begin by going back to Flesch, since he continued to record through
the 1930s and was so influential as a teacher and writer. His electrical recordings (see
Table 1 and 2) show that his vibrato changed not at all from 1905 to 1936, and that it
was always deep and slow compared to Joachim or Kreisler. And if we compare his
electrical recording of the Brahms concerto, preserved on acetates as yet undated, with
that of Bronislaw Hubermann, born in 1882, we can see an even more ‘extreme’ case in
another of the older recorded violinists, suggesting that any notion that vibrato was
narrow and fast at the beginning of the 20th century is an over-simplification.

Table 2

¶20 In fact vibrato characteristics change far less clearly across Table 2 than one might
have expected, and if we compare Hubermann with, for example, Mutter it’s hard to say
who is the more ‘modern’. More interesting, if we want to trace developments, is
Hubermann’s varying use of vibrato, which tends to get deeper as a note becomes
louder, and also as phrases rise towards a peak, while lower notes tend to have
shallower vibrato, sometimes reduced to almost none as phrase-ends come in to land.
For Hubermann, then, there’s a clear connection between vibrato depth and emotional
weight; which is something we discerned on a considerably smaller scale in Joachim,
and to some extent in Flesch, but only rarely in Kreisler (Table 1). From Hubermann
onwards, though, every player up to the present day makes this relationship absolutely
consistently. Is it possible that the tying together of expressivity in loudness, vibrato and
the composition’s surface—which has seemed so obvious to players ever since that it
was not questioned again until so-called ‘Historically Informed Performance’—really
did not happen before players born in the 1880s? It seems extraordinarily unlikely, and
it may be simply that the generations represented at the top of Table 1 recorded too little
for us to hear examples of it, or that it temporarily fell out of use during a more ‘puritan’
phase in the history of performance style. It’s a question for further research. Whatever
the reason, this change looks and sounds very significant, and signals a development
towards a more overt expressivity, one that in Hubermann is particularly obvious
because his vibrato is so slow and so deep.

¶21 Hubermann studied first at the Warsaw conservatory, and then with Joachim’s
assistant in Berlin (among others). Josef Szigeti, born a decade later in 1892, followed a
similar path, studying as a child in Budapest under Hubay, but making his debut in
Berlin (1905), where he heard Elman, Kreisler and Ysaye; he lived in Britain for six
years in his teens. So in his case we’re hearing the playing of a relatively young man (as
recorded violinists go) who’d grown up with Kreisler as one of a number of available
models. There is an early Bach recording, of the Prelude to the E major partita, made in
1908, 33 with virtually no vibrato at all until the closing bars, 34 where its characteristics
are much the same as Joachim’s. But it is hard to imagine that the Brahms Concerto
(Table 2) is the work of the same player; and in a sense, when you consider his age in
1908, it isn’t. So naturally enough it is with the later Kreisler that he can be most
sensibly compared. A tendency noticeable in Kreisler’s recordings of the 1910s and 20s
is taken a small step further here, namely an increase in rubato, and especially in the use
of rubato, crescendo, portamento, and widening vibrato together to mark the most
expressive notes of a musical phrase. 35 In other words, just as we saw in Hubermann’s
vibrato use, there’s a clear inflation in expressivity; and when one considers the date
and the sorts of things that singers were doing at the same time, it’s not surprising that
for a young musician in the 20s a more intensely expressive style seemed entirely
natural. (Also noticeable is that the speed of Szigeti’s vibrato is much more regular,
hardly varying at all.)

¶22 Jascha Heifetz is another decade younger, born in 1901, and studied with Auer in
his native Russia before moving to America in 1917. Like so many in this survey, he
made his debut in Berlin; and so despite their varied origins, it's clear that these players
gravitated towards an international career and an equally international style. What
differentiates Heifetz has much to do with his extremely flexible vibrato usage. 36 In his
Brahms slow movement, for example, high notes have the deepest and fastest vibrato,
low notes the most shallow and slow, all of which forms a more complex picture than
one might think. Deep, fast and slow can all be used to signal feeling; what kind of
feeling depends on the combination: deep plus fast tends to suggest excitement, while
slow plus shallow suggests heartfelt feeling but of a more restrained sort. The low notes
add into the mix the richest sounds Heifetz makes. In other words, he has a number of
different ways of producing intense expressivity, and tends to make different effects in
different registers, giving a sense of lively responsiveness to the changing surface of the
music. Individual notes tend to be quite even, so his playing sounds regular and
controlled and yet intensely engaging, which matches well with the many reports of a
striking contrast between his inexpressive appearance and highly expressive sounds. 37
In fact, while commenting on how he looked in performance they were, without
realising it, talking about the sounds too.

¶23 Joachim Hartnack, writing from a more conventional, perhaps even chauvinist
perspective, 38 and for a moment recalling Adorno, was one commentator who loathed
the evenness of Heifetz’s style, and his denunciation of it is worth quoting both for its
tone and also because it points to one way in which performance style can seem to relate
to wider cultural tendencies.

It is the consummate expression of a widely-accepted American ideal of beauty,

fulfilled in the pure aestheticism from which all impurities, but also all problems have
been eliminated. The norm of this ideal corresponds to the average of the modern
consumer society. Its lower limits are delineated by the chrome and glass of
automobiles, the middle range shaped by pretty and boring advertising models who woo
the consumer with their sterile smile to buy Cola-Cola or toothpaste, and the upper limit
is formed by the aesthetics of cubism as expressed in the architecture of skyscrapers or
by the smoothness of sentiment and tone of a Heifetz. 39

¶24 Nathan Milstein, just two years younger than Heifetz, followed close in his
footsteps studying with Auer at the St Petersburg conservatoire, and it may not be too
surprising, then, that his vibrato is very similar in its speed and range of depth, 40
although Milstein varies depth according to expressive intensity without tying that so
closely to tessitura. As with Heifetz, individual notes are very even, though Milstein
shapes each by taking several vibrato cycles to reach its full extent: each note, in other
words, begins with a vibrato ‘crescendo’ which functions as a form of articulation,
giving each a subtler quality of yearning than can be achieved by a loudness crescendo.
Both players use vibrato even on the short triplet semiquavers, which earlier players
(Hubermann, Kreisler, Flesch) more often left partly plain.

¶25 Neveu’s two performances of the Brahms are very similar, at least in those details
that are wholly under her control, and her tendency to deep vibrato and to wide tempo
variation (not always successfully reined in by Issay Dobrowen, the conductor of the
1946 performance) gives her personal style a particular intensity which, as we shall see
when we analyse the Table 2 statistics more closely, is exceptional for her generation.
The unevenness of vibrato we saw in Kreisler’s playing is characteristic of hers as well,
but of no one else in this comparison, and it too may contribute to the passion and sense
of engagement that commentators particularly sensed in her playing.

¶26 Stern’s vibrato shows a very clear link between speed, depth and expressivity. As in
all these players, but to a marked degree here, faster = deeper = more expressive; and so
in this Brahms extract the first, ‘winding-up’ half intensifies in each dimension, while
the second, winding-down, relaxes. Interestingly, and exceptionally, Stern doesn’t use
portamento on the way up, only on the way down, and it’s possible that it’s used to
compensate for the winding down effect of melody and vibrato, so that latter part of this
passage, ending the slow movement, doesn’t sound any less expressive overall.
¶27 As we work though these performances I hope it’s becoming clearer how individual
styles differ within a really rather consistent extended period style, so extended in fact
that were it not for the emerging influence of HIP in mainstream playing during the
1990s, one might almost suppose that violin style became largely set in stone with the
generation following Kreisler. In fact, the picture that emerges from players born after
1940 is surprisingly varied, and it may be that it was precisely the stability of general
style that made this possible. Kremer, Mutter, and Shaham have deeper and (less so
Kremer) faster vibrato than became the norm. Mutter in particular goes to the extreme
end of her range of speed and depth a lot, and her vibrato is very closely tied to
dynamics. As a consequence she stands out far from the orchestral accompaniment, very
much the soloist. It’s also a slow performance so a lot of vibrating gets done on each
melody note. If intensity is to be communicated through vibrato and dynamics it’s hard
to imagine a performance of the Brahms Concerto getting more intense than this. She
also uses a lot of portamenti—slightly more than most early recorded players, in fact—
but on the other hand hers are much shorter. Portamento, one feels, is for Mutter simply
a tool to ratchet up the expressivity that she seems so desperately to need. Some similar
points could be made about Shaham’s performance. It might be tempting to argue that
these two owe something to the Berlin Philharmonic, with which both are playing on
these recordings, but not only are the conductors different (Karajan and Abbado), these
features of personal style are far too ingrained to be turned on and off according to the
accompaniment.

¶28 Among the youngest Brahms players here, Vengerov uses almost no portamento
and rather slow vibrato, while Barton uses a lot of portamento—the most since Mutter
and Kremer—but rather fast vibrato (mostly, despite her wide range, staying at 0.15s
per cycle, together with Shaham the fastest since Stern). Barton writes historically in her
CD booklet and pairs the Brahms with its supposed model, Joachim’s 2nd concerto, as
well as using a violin Brahms knew, so it’s quite likely that her increased use of
portamento is also an attempt to be historical, an early sign of the growing influence of
historical recordings in mainstream playing, while Vengerov is old enough to have been
influenced by HIP—amusingly generating more or less opposite tendencies.

¶29 Turning to the Beethoven Concerto, it’s worth noting first of all how similar are the
1926 and 1936 performances of Kreisler. It’s a cliché that no one can give the same
performance twice, but in fact there are plenty of examples on record of a popular
performer in a popular piece playing in a very similar way. Neveu’s Brahms is one
example. (Another is the Myra Hess case mentioned already, and more will be noted
later.) This is another way of saying that performances become (procedurally) routine
when they’ve been given often enough. Compared to Kreisler’s Beethoven, Georg
Kulenkampff’s sounds not dissimilar in many ways. Kulenkampff was born a
generation later, in 1898, and made his recording in 1936; and while his vibrato can on
occasion be deeper than Kreisler’s it is only in his much less frequent use of portamento
that he sounds noticeably more modern.

¶30 Heifetz again varies speed and depth of vibrato; here, with fewer opportunities for
lingering than in the Brahms slow movement, it’s more noticeably related to intensity.
Relaxed, lower notes tend to have slower shallower vibrato; more intense, louder. Often
higher notes tend to have faster and deeper vibrato, but it depends on the character of
the performance from moment to moment; in other words it’s tied to Heifetz’s reading
of the score as much as to the score directly. He uses changes in the dimensions of his
vibrato, in other words, to characterise passages as he wishes. For example, in the first
movement of the Beethoven Concerto the passage from bars 335-9 ‘modulates’ from
0.3st to 0.6 and back to zero as the line ascends and then descends; in the decorated
restatement that follows one particularly intense note (bar 343i) almost reaches a
semitone depth and 0.12secs speed. Heifetz shows, then, an extremely skilful and
flexible matching of vibrato depth, speed, dynamics and rubato to respond sensitively to
the momentarily changing character perceived in the score: and the relation between
these elements is constantly changing.

¶31 Although they are of very different generations, Perlman (born 1945) like Milstein
(born 1903) uses ‘hairpin’ vibrato on the main melody notes, especially in the slow
movement, which tend at the most expressive moments to be matched to dynamic
hairpins. The notion of shaping a note by increasing and then decreasing one of its
dimensions is something that recurs in different forms throughout the recorded history
of performance—it’s a defining feature of HIP, of course—but its application to vibrato
depth is relatively unusual, and in mainstream violin playing a feature of personal rather
than period style.

¶32 Chung (born 1948) is especially interesting because her vibrato speed varies a lot,
and so seems to play as important a part in the changing emotional surface of her
playing as changes in depth. And she seems able to separate them to allow a wider
palette of effects. At the start of the Beethoven slow movement extract, bar 45, for
example, a very slow and very shallow vibrato combines with the slow speed and low
amplitude to produce intense stillness which gradually becomes more active with each
subsequent note as the vibrato speeds up and becomes slightly wider, and the loudness
increases through to bar 47. The same happens again through bars 48-9, with the
chromatic a’# shallower and even slower than in bar 45 but louder, which makes the
effect distinctly less restful: we expect speed, depth and loudness to go together, and
here when they don’t it’s appropriately unsettling. This is perhaps a symptom of the
increasing control achieved by players later in the century—it’s certainly hard to
imagine Kreisler, with his unsteady vibrato, managing this in any consistent way.
Chung’s Rondo-Allegro is much narrower in range of effects, reflecting a simple view
of the character of middle and final movements.

¶33 Joshua Bell (born 1967) is conducted by Roger Norrington, so speeds are fast and
vibrato is presumably discouraged; but Bell occasionally forgets himself and reverts to
normal modern practice at especially expressive moments. Thus although most of his
vibrato is confined between 0.3 and 0.5 semitones, there are some peaks at 0.7. Nothing
else distinguishes his performance, apart from some scrambling for notes, poor editing
and more than average portamento in the Beethoven 3rd movement episode theme,
perhaps encouraged by Norrington in the light of early recordings.

¶34 Hahn, the youngest player here, born in 1979, shows a more recent trend, in which
(influenced without doubt by HIP) vibrato is reducing and narrowing again, although
the equation ‘louder = faster = deeper = more expressive intensity’ still applies. Like
almost everyone else she uses faster vibrato in the faster movement, again probably
because she’s more excited (as opposed to moved) by the more lively composition. One
might think there’s a contradiction here, but in fact much of the expressivity of slow
movements comes from their stillness. 41
Portamento

Figure 3: Portamento slide lengths in Brahms, Violin Concert, 3rd movement,

bb.126-34

¶35 Focussing on vibrato use has shown up quite a number of significant points of style
in violin playing. We’ve seen how speed and depth can be fixed or flexible, how when
flexible it can respond to changes in melodic direction and tessitura, and how it can be
linked to changes in loudness, so that small changes in this one dimension can have
very significant effects for the perception of expressivity. What we’ve not seen very
much, at least not since players born in the 1880s, is fundamental change in general
period style. And in this sense violin playing looks rather unlike singing. We’ll return to
this in a moment, but first let’s look a little more closely at portamento, that other means
of being expressive with pitch for which stringed instruments are so well adapted.

Figure 4: Portamento slide lengths in Brahms, Violin Concerto, 2nd movement,

bb. 90-103

¶36 Figures 3 and 4 show parts of the extracts from the Beethoven and Brahms
concertos used as a constant in Table 2. The numbers indicate the (very) approximate
length in hundredths of a second of each portamento for each player. 42 A chart like this
can be surprisingly informative. Given enough performances it allows us to distinguish
between traditional and individual choices of portamento placing, and gives a sense of
any trends. In Figure 4 (Figure 3 is less use because there are so few players) one sees at
once how the lengths diminish quite suddenly after Hubermann. The number of
portamenti used in each passage, however, remains strikingly stable across the century,
with few exceptions (for example Hubermann who likes a lot, Stern who doesn’t); and
again this suggests a much less consistent change in performance style over time than
has been suggested, or than we saw in singing. Portamento remains common in violin
playing throughout the century; we just don’t notice it so much.

¶37 For more precise observations, though, we need to treat these figures, and those for
vibrato, as raw data and graph them. Trends will then become clear that are far harder to
see in tables of numbers.

Figure 5

¶38 Figure 5 plots speed of vibrato (slower at the top, faster at the bottom) against birth
date of the performers, and shows first how varied it was earlier in the century (among
players born up to the 1920s) and how much more consistent it is now (players born
from the 1940s onwards), and secondly how the overall trend has been towards slower
vibrato. It’s worth bearing in mind that the speed given is a rather crude average of the
range used by each player, and doesn’t account for tendencies to remain within a limited
part of that range for most of the time. Thus Barton, for example, is misrepresented as
having an average of 0.165s per vibrato cycle when in fact, as we’ve seen, she mostly
sticks to 0.15. These sorts of details should ideally be improved in future research,
although at the moment, given the current state of the software, to collect such detailed
data would be immensely time-consuming.

Figure 6

¶39 Figure 6 plots the depth of vibrato (deeper at the top, more shallow at the bottom)
against birth date, and presents a more complex picture. Overall there seems to be little
change, but within that overall picture are a number of changes that may perhaps be
related to other developments in violin playing. The increasing consistency among
players born in the 1890s and 1900s—Szigeti, Kulenkampff, Milstein, and also
Schneiderhahn—may relate to the growing internationalisation of playing as more
violinists gravitated towards the same centres for study and their early careers. Leaving
aside Neveu as exceptional, which she was in other ways too as we’ve seen, the
tendency through Shumsky, Stern (born in the late 1910s), Perlman and Chung (the late
1940s) is towards shallower vibrato; but overlapping that, one can also see a deepening
from Perlman (born 1945) through to Shaham (born 1971), reflecting the intensification
of overt expressivity through the generations for whom the Amadeus Quartet and
Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic, in their different ways emblematic of professional
emotionalism, were the acme of recorded musical excellence. And then from Shaham
through to Hahn there is a very obvious trend towards ever shallower vibrato, surely
brought about by the influence of HIP and the spread into mainstream music-making of
its determined reaction against exactly that kind of heavy, almost plastered-on
emotional gesture.

Figure 7: Number of portamenti in Beethoven and Brahms extracts, by birth date

of player

¶40 There are plenty of other stories one could tell using the graphs in Figures 5 and 6.
What we really need is more hard evidence, and it should be one task of future research
to gather it. Turning to portamento, Figure 7 plots the number of portamenti in the
chosen passages against birth date. For these purposes the Beethoven extract is really
too small to compare well with the Brahms, but there are enough similarities to suggest
that it’s not useless. Again, a targeted research project—as opposed to an illustration of
a method, which is the main intention here—would generate much more data. 43

¶41 Nevertheless, some trends are very obvious and—surprisingly—are clearly related
to vibrato practice. Portamento seems here to be used increasingly among players born
up to the 1900s, at the same time that vibrato was deepening; then it falls off rapidly for
players born in the 1910s, just as vibrato become shallower; portamento use increases
again for players born in the 40s and 60s, like vibrato depth; and it falls off a lot among
the youngest players (except Barton who, as we’ve seen, may have had reasons of
historical principle, rather than general period style, for using more). 44 But why is there
this link with vibrato? Presumably the two are perceived as generators of more overt
expressivity, and it’s this underlying desire for more or less intense expression that is
changing. What underlies that, in turn, is likely to be extra-musical, a more general
trend in styles of emotional communication in society reflecting something really quite
fundamental and widespread about the way people think and behave.

Figure 8: Length of portamenti (in milliseconds) in Beethoven and Brahms

extracts, by birth date of player

¶42 Figure 8 inflects this story in a rather interesting way, plotting the average length of
a player’s portamenti against their birth dates. This is simply a graphic representation of
the data in Figures 3 and 4. There was a sudden drop after Hubermann, then a steady
decline throughout the century until the sudden leap with Shaham, Vengerov and Barton
(all born in the 1970s). Long portamento became an embarrassment until very recently,
but it still has quite some way to go before it reaches the style practised at the start of
the 20th century. Indeed, the fact that it’s still generally supposed that portamento is not
much used any more—despite the wealth of evidence here that it is—suggests that there
is some kind of perceptual threshold between 150ms and 180ms that has yet to be
crossed. Below it portamento is perceived as an ornament, above as an exaggeration. It
will be interesting to see what happens next.

Table 3: Violin portamento lengths from Flesch onwards

¶43 Table 3 shows the standard deviations for portamento lengths. Standard deviation
represents the variety of lengths used by each player: the higher the number the greater
the differences among lengths used. We need to be careful not to read too much into
these figures, because differences in lengths are small enough in real time not to be
perceptually very striking, and so it’s no surprise that those who use longer slides will
show more variation among them. But even so it’s striking the extent to which Flesch
made more varied use of portamento than anyone else. Shaham, with his idiosyncratic
taste (among modern players) for long portamenti, comes a not very close second. It’s
also interesting that players born in the 1910s, whom we saw using less portamento and
shallower vibrato, nevertheless make relatively varied use of portamento compared to
both earlier and later violinists. I hope this emphasises the subtlety of changes in
performance style. It’s all too easy, as I’ve unfortunately demonstrated again and again,
to summarize performance styles in crude generalisations, but in fact what’s going on
when styles change is a lot more complex, with the constituent elements of style
changing in different ways. It’s why performance styles never recur, even when we try
to make them.

Table 4: Violin portamento loudnesses from Flesch onwards

¶44 Table 4, finally, shows for all the Brahms extracts the relative loudness of the slide
compared to the main notes on either side. We’ve already seen how the idea that
portamento was dropped early in the 20th century is contradicted by the concerto
evidence. Certainly it was reduced, but there has been plenty of it ever since. Could it
be, I wondered, that our perception of portamento depends not just on the number and
length of slides, but also on their loudness relative to the notes they join? The point of
Table 4 was to test the hypothesis. It seems to me that the answer is a clear no. There is
no consistent pattern of increased, decreased or steady loudness either across time, or
according to musical context, or within the work of any player. A graphic representation
of these numbers, using a spreadsheet’s graphing facility to turn them into directional
lines coded by colour for each performer helps make this even clearer. (Figure 9)
Portamento loudness, on this very limited evidence, seems entirely accidental, not a
factor controlled by players.

Figure 9: Loudness of portamento slides (dB) in Brahms, Violin Concerto, 2nd

movement, bb. 99-100

¶45 That’s not to say, however, that we don’t perceive it as playing some part in the
effect. If we compare the portamenti that end bar 100 in the Hubermann and Busch
performances of the Brahms extract we can hear that Hubermann uses a long soft slide
where Busch uses a short loud one, yet the effect feels rather similar. A possible
explanation is that there’s some sort of balancing of length and loudness, so that an
increase in one dimension can be counteracted by a decrease in the other, or emphasised
if one wants a stronger effect. At any rate, examples like this could be studied in greater
quantity and with greater accuracy in order to test the extents to which we perceive
loudness and length as active constituents in the effect that a portamento has on us as
listeners. So even though players seem to control only length, both length and loudness
may matter, and may be able to work together or against each other. But this is a tiny
sample, and clearly measurements need to be made and analysed over much larger
pieces. The main technical obstacle is that, so long as analysis software is unable to
match the ear’s ability to focus on the loudness of solo line regardless of orchestral
accompaniment, it’s going to be necessary to take solo pieces or long solo passages
(cadenzas from concerti would do if enough players used the same one, which here they
don’t) recorded by many players over long periods of time. It would be a worthwhile
experiment, though.

¶46 One other factor in our perception of portamento may very well be the shape of a
slide—for example rising fast at first and then tapering off, or vice versa—and its
relation to the kind of slide (from the first note or to the second) that’s being used. Since
other factors seem not to, it may be this that makes early-20th and early-21st century
portamenti sound significantly different, even on occasions when the lengths of slides
are similar. At present I’m not aware of a manageable way of mapping and quantifying
those details, short of differential calculus, but it would be worth further investigation.

Conclusions

¶47 What can we conclude about changing styles of violin playing on record, and their
relationship to singing? Early in the 20th century vibrato speed appears to slow down,
but only if we include Joachim. We can’t know, because we have no other players of his
generation on record, but if he were exceptional then we’d see vibrato speeding up
through to players born in the 1900s, which just goes to show how fragile any
conclusions about 19th-century violin playing must be. With or without him, vibrato
depth increases through to players born in the 1900s, and then on average remains fairly
steady until recent times. Vibrato was continuously present on all but the shortest notes
from at least Auer (born 1845) onwards, but became noticeable and discussed only once
it got deeper, from Flesch and Kreisler (born in the 1870s). From Flesch sometimes, and
regularly from Hubermann (born 1882) for ever after, vibrato was varied in depth from
moment to moment, coordinated with changes in loudness, in order to give expression
to changes in musical character.

¶48 What do all these changes add up to? It seems safe to assume that deeper vibrato
signals deeper expressivity. We’ll look more carefully at these kinds of associations in
chapter 8, but the analogy with voices trembling with emotion seems fairly
uncontentious here. 45 There are acoustic reasons for using vibrato—it makes a solo
instrument stand out better from an orchestral accompaniment—but there are clear
emotional connotations too. Portamento works through more complex associations—
with infant-directed speech—that I’ve examined in a separate study. 46 I won’t rehearse
the findings here: suffice it to say that there are good reasons why we perceive
portamento as emotionally moving. But what of vibrato speed? Is it more expressive
when it’s fast or when it’s slow? I’ve already suggested that either is possible when one
considers it alone. But the brain is promiscuous in making relationships between
signifiers and signifieds, and one sign alone is rarely enough. You need several pointing
in the same direction, for example vibrato speed, vibrato depth, tessitura, melodic shape,
harmonic direction, loudness. 47 If all the others point towards greater expressivity (for
example a rising line, increasing loudness, harmonic crux, vibrato depth) then it doesn’t
matter whether vibrato is faster or slower than usual, either will be taken to signify
greater expressive intensity. This is a principle with important ramifications for our
understanding of musical performance, and one to which we’ll return. 48 The
possibilities for combining details in new ways are far greater because of it, so style can
change more radically and in more directions from era to era.

¶49 How does it work in practice for violinists? Probably rather simply: the linking of
vibrato rate, depth, loudness, and melodic shape signals the performer’s wholehearted
physical and emotional involvement in the music; genuine excitement, one imagines as
an innocent listener, causes the finger to move faster, the bow to press harder, as the
music gets more intense, and to relax when the music relaxes. Of course we can see that
this is hopelessly naive: ‘the music’ is not just the score, but what the player does to it,
so what is really happening involves the player’s learned response to certain kinds of
melodic and harmonic configurations which they choose to read as requiring certain
levels of intensity for their most effective expression in performance, and these levels
are then signalled by physical gestures that cause sounds with particular associations for
knowledgeable listeners. The experience, though, depends on listeners, and at their most
involved performers too, believing and feeling that these kinds of sounds most naturally
represent feelings expressed by the composer in the score.

¶50 Given that context, it’s reasonable to understand the changes we’ve seen in violin
playing as reflecting a gradual inflation in expressivity through the first few decades of
the century, which does indeed parallel that seen in singing, and in fact in all genres of
classical music-making on record. But it’s much less obvious than it was in singing, and
overall violin playing has been much more consistent over the last 100 years. Why?

¶51 With all respect to instrumentalists, any instrument is more limited than the voice in
the means at its disposal. And so the possibilities for recombining the physical
capabilities (in this case continuously changing pitch and loudness) are more limited.
The relative inability of instruments to vary the spectrum from microsecond to
microsecond, causing a relatively fixed tone and making it impossible to produce
vowels and consonants, and hence text, inevitably limits the expressive options. So, it’s
particularly interesting that it’s singing that violin playing has always been said to
imitate, with violinists considered the divas of instrumental playing. The ease with
which a violinist produces portamento and vibrato is, of course, the main reason. Just as
in singing, vibrato and portamento seem to say, ‘see how intensely I feel this music’.
But whereas in singing there are expressive reasons (in the text) why some notes can
stand out from their surroundings, or disappear into them, allowing a much more
variable surface, whose manner of variation can change over time, in instrumental
playing there is no such reason, and notes that are suddenly louder or softer, or are
attacked in very different ways, just seem awkward and out of place. With fewer
opportunities for changeability, there are fewer possibilities for general style change
over time. Instrumental playing is necessarily more consistent than singing.

¶52 It’s often said that there’s been a homogenisation of instrumental performance style,
49
and in a way that’s true. We’ve seen that there was much more variation between
players born before 1900. Whether we look at the graphs of vibrato speed (Figure 5) or
portamento length (Figure 8) or (to a lesser extent) vibrato depth (Figure 6) there has
been a narrowing of options. But in no case, except perhaps vibrato speed, has playing
become really consistent. And we have too few players on record born before 1900 for
us to be confident that we really know how people typically played before about 1920.
I’m not sure, therefore, whether things are as bad as is sometimes suggested. But if
there is one thing these examples do tell us it is that there are a lot more ways of making
music on the violin than we’ve heard recently, and it might be rather interesting to hear
some of them reappearing in new combinations in the future.

¶53 My other purpose here, of course, has been to illustrate methodologies: describing
performers’ sounds and styles in words, both in detail and in general, gathering and
analysing data, using graphs, thinking about how we perceive details and their
interrelation when we listen to a performance. I hope readers have enough ideas, now,
about ways in which one might study style change for me to focus, in an introduction to
20th-century piano playing, on other, perhaps more contentious issues.

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Footnotes

1.
Milsom (2003). Back to context...
2.
Some of the following, especially the discussions of Joachim and Kreisler, was
adapted for Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Early recorded violin playing: evidence for
what?’, in ed. Claudio Bacciagaluppi, Aspekte der Streicherpraxis in der
Romantik, Musikforschung der Hochschule der Künste Bern, vol. 3 (Bern:
forthcoming). Back to context...
3.
On clichés bound up with the notion of romantic performance see Barolsky
(2005), 160-66; and Robert Philip, ‘The Romantic and the old-fashioned’, in ed.
Erik Kjellberg, Erik Lundkvist & Jan Roström, The Interpretation of Romantic
and Late-Romantic Music: papers read at the Organ Symposium in Stockholm,
3-12 September 1998 (Uppsala, Uppsala Universitet, 2002), 11-31. A valuable
study of Joachim’s recordings compared to the comments of contemporary
critics on his playing is Dorottya Fabian, ‘The recordings of Joachim, Ysaÿe and
Sarasate in light of their reception by nineteenth-century British critics’,
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 37 (2006), 189-
211. Back to context...
4.
See also Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900
(Oxford University Press, 1999), 535. Back to context...
5.
That Joachim’s playing has been underestimated by commentators on his
recordings is suggested by reviews of his earlier concerts. Hanslick (1963), 78-
81. By 1890, however, Shaw found him very variable, much more impressive in
nineteenth-century repertoire than in Bach, which is just what we hear on the
recordings. (Ed. Dan H. Laurence, Shaw’s Music (London: Bodley Press, 1981),
vol. 1, 933-4; vol. 2, 11, 270, 844-6; vol. 3, 137-8.) Back to context...
6.
Milsom (2003), passim. Back to context...
7.
So that now notes requiring special treatment are played without vibrato. See
Renee Timmers and Peter Desain, ‘Vibrato: The questions and answers from
musicians and science’, in Proceedings of the International Conference on
Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), 2000, available at
 http://www.nici.kun.nl/mmm/papers/mmm-35/mmm-35.pdf. Back to context...
8.
Katz (2004), 93-7. Back to context...
9.
E.g. Itzhak Perlman in Bruno Monsaingeon, The Art of Violin (NVC Arts 2001),
videotape, 4' 01"–4' 36". Back to context...
10.
Since Carl Flesch , The Art of Violin Playing (Boston: Fischer, 1924), 40; see
also his comments in his Mémoires (London: Rockliff, 1957), 120, quoted in
Brown (1999), 535; Katz (2004), 88-9, 217. Back to context...
11.
Milsom (2003) provides a very good, impressionistic discussion of vibrato
practices at this time, esp. 127-41. Back to context...
12.
It is essential to bear in mind that these figures are derived from the transfers
listed, and depend on the speed at which the originals discs were transferred
(and recorded). As we know from chapter 3, they may be wrong. Back to
context...
13.
In this case Spectrogram ( www.visualizationsoftware.com/gram.html). Back to
context...
14.
Using Alex Galembo’s online converter, available at the time of writing at
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/8779/chc1.html. Another way to
do it now would be to use the on-screen data displayed in Sonic Visualiser.
There’s an explanation of how to do this in chapter 8 below, discussing a
recording by the violinist Albert Sandler, Sound File 37 (wav file), Data File 8
(sv file). Dorottya Fabian kindly offers the following formula for converting Hz
to fractions of a semitone: =2*Hz range/(0.059*(top Hz value+lower Hz value)).
Back to context...
15.
Much the most detailed studies of vibrato are the earliest, especially those made
by Carl Seashore’s group at the University of Iowa in the 1920s and 30s (ed.
Seashore (1932); ed. Seashore (1936)). Their essays remain indispensable,
marred only by their not having been able to know, at that early stage in
recording, that vibrato changes from generation to generation, so that some of
the features of ‘The Vibrato’ that they identified are in fact changeable. Back to
context...
16.
Leopold Auer, Violin Playing as I Teach it (London: Duckworth, 1921). Quoted
in Brown (1999), 522, and Milsom (2003), 116, who detects desperation in
Auer’s form of words. Interestingly, Metfessel (1932), 109-10, reports tests on a
recording of ’an English musician’ whose book on singing condemned vibrato
but whose recorded performances used it. Metfessel finds that test subjects
widely underestimate their own vibrato. Back to context...
17.
There is a brief sketch of changing habits of vibrato in Werner Hauck, Vibrato
on the Violin, transl. Kitty Rokos (London: Bosworth, 1975), esp. 1-26. Hauck
depends heavily on Joachim Hartnack, Grosse Geiger unserer Zeit (Gütersloh:
Bertelsman, 1968) which makes substantial (and early) use of recordings as its
 evidence. Back to context...
18.
A famous statement of this claim is Roger Norrington’s in ‘Time to Rid
Orchestras of the Shakes’, New York Times, Sunday February 16, 2003, Late
Edition–Final, Section 2, 32. But Norrington’s views on 19th-century vibrato-
free orchestral playing have yet to be substantiated through research. Back to
context...
19.
Louis Spohr, Violinschule (Vienna, 1832), 175-6; translated J. Bishop (London,
1843), 163-8. I am indebted to Robin Stowell for discussing with me the former,
and to Abigail Dolan for a copy of the latter. See also Robin Stowell, Violin
Technique and Performance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1985), 206-7. I owe my first sight of
Ferdinand David’s extraordinarily revealing example 122 to Clive Brown.
Ferdinand David, Violinschule (Leipzig, 1864; edition consulted Leipzig [1874],
43). Back to context...
20.
Bruno Repp, ‘Probing the cognitive representation of musical time: Structural
constraints on the perception of timing perturbations’, Cognition 44 (1992), 241-
81. Back to context...
21.
Colin Gough has suggested to me, however, that this difference may be no more
than an artefact of the different recording processes, acoustic and electric. The
possibility remains to be thoroughly tested by looking closely at many other
players who recorded using both processes. The difficulty is that there are no
controls, but a pattern emerging strongly would need to be taken very seriously.
Back to context...
22.
For discussions of (respectively) the acoustic and perceptual considerations
surrounding vibrato see Colin Gough, ‘Measurement, modelling and synthesis of
violin vibrato sounds’, Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 91 (2005), 229-40;
Timmers and Desain (2000); and also Metfessel (1932), 86-94, which is an early
attempt to talk rationally about the association of vibrato and nervousness. To
the extent that such an association, generated by our knowledge of the
circumstances in which voices tremble, is evoked in listening to musical vibrato
(which remains to be determined) a more regular vibrato is likely, as Metfessel
argues, to evoke controlled emotion, and in that case, I suggest, would more
easily have become continuous rather than occasional and ornamental. In other
words, it may not be coincidence that continuous relatively wide vibrato became
the norm at the same moment as regular vibrato. Back to context...
23.
One that takes account also of the research into the interaction of the Franco-
Belgian with other national schools of violin playing. Louis P. Lochner reports
Kreisler’s attribution of his vibrato style to the Franco-Belgian tradition,
contrasting it with Joachim. How accurate Kreisler’s little historical sketch may
be remains to be determined. (Lochner (1950), 21.) Back to context...
24.
An early study of Kreisler’s vibrato using recordings is Scott N. Reger, ‘The
string instrument vibrato’, in ed. Seashore (1932), 305-43, citing a previous
study by M. Hollinshead which I have not seen, ‘A study of the vibrato in
 artistic violin playing’, Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress on
Psychology, 1930, 224. Back to context...
25.
Matrix C-8942-1; reissued on RCA 009026 61649, disc 1, track 1, which is my
source for these comments. Back to context...
26.
RCA 009026 61649, disc 2, track 2. Back to context...
27.
Kreisler’s biographer, Louis P. Lochner, quotes perhaps the first analysis of a
performer’s style from recordings, made in 1916 by Eugene Riviere Redervill
who says of Kreisler’s vibrato that, slowed down to of normal speed, it seems
to him to be ‘nearly double the speed of most other artists’. But I have not been
able to find evidence to support him. Lochner (1950), 272-3. Back to context...
28.
Perlman speaks of ‘an inner warmth in his playing’ in Monsaingeon 2000, 1hr
04’00”–1hr 04’25”. Back to context...
29.
Lochner (1950), 273. Back to context...
30.
Lochner (1950), 127. Back to context...
31.
Elman (b. 1891) is the next violinist with a comparable output, Heifetz (b. 1901)
the first to substantially supercede them. James Creighton, Discopaedia of the
Violin 1889-1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Back to
context...
32.
As to my choice of extracts in the following analyses, summarised in Table 2,
the Beethoven slow movement allows closer comparison with the Brahms slow
movement, but the Beethoven Rondo Allegro episode offers a useful contrast to
test the slow movement findings. Back to context...
33.
‘EMI Centenary Edition’, disc 2 (7243 5 66184 2), track 1 (from HMV 07911
(2611f), 30 Sept 1908). Back to context...
34.
There is a single cycle on each of the ‘bass’ notes that anchor the arpeggios from
b. 43 onwards. Back to context...
35.
See, for example, 6' 40"–7' 35" in the second movement. Back to context...
36.
Helen Ashcroft, in a carefully researched essay for my ‘Schubert Song on
Record’ course at King’s College London, suggested on the basis of
spectrographic comparison that Heifetz had an unusually light and agile left
hand technique, using less pressure on the string and moving position faster than
contemporaries used for comparison (Ashcroft (2002), 14). This merits further
research. She also noted his remarkable consistency, even in quite minute
details, in all three recordings of the Brahms concerto, 1935, 49 and 55, despite
changes in tempo and recording technique; another instance of a performer
settling on a performance and reproducing it over many years (25-7). Back to
context...
37.
 Itzhak Perlman in The Art of Violin, 26’51”–27’08”. The word endlessly used
about Heifetz is ‘aristocratic’, meaning (as usual) ‘appearing cold and
unemotional’. There is a rather delightful, and far from inexpressive photograph
of Heifetz about to attack his sister with a violin in Miller & Boar (1982), 163.
Back to context...
38.
Note also his relegation of female violinists to a brief final chapter in his lengthy
book. Back to context...
39.
Joachim Hartnack, Grosse Geiger unserer Zeit (Gütersloh: Bertelsman, 1968),
179, as cited in Hauck (1975), 26. The original German (including the omitted
passage) reads, ‘Er is der vollendetste Ausdruck eines verbreiteten
amerikanischen Schönheitsideals, das in dem puren Ästhetizismus, aus dem alle
Schlacken, aber auch alle Probleme herausdestilliert sind, seine Erfüllung findet.
Dieses Schönheitsideal ist genormt nach dem Maß des Durchschnitts einer
modernen Konsumgesellschaft. Nach unten wird es begrenzt durch Chrom und
Lack von Automobilen, in der Mittellage wird es durch die langweilig hübschen
Reklamemädchen bestimmt, die mit ihrem sterilen Lächeln für Coca-Cola oder
Zahnpasta werben, und nach oben ist die Grenze gezogen durch die Ästhetik des
Kubismus der Wolkenkratzerarchitekturen oder die Ton- und
Empfinndungsglätte eines Heifetz.’ The comparison with automobile chrome is
lifted from Adorno on Toscanini: ‘His performances flashed and sparkled, as if
polished with chrome’, Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The mastery of the maestro’ in ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, transl. Rodney Livingstone, Sound Figures, (Stanford
University Press, 1999), 40-53 at 41; see also the analogy with admiration for a
Cadillac rather than great art, 52. Back to context...
40.
Ashcroft (2002), 28-30, compares habits of Heifetz, Milstein and Elman, all
pupils of Auer, and finds Milstein and Elman more alike (and more Auer-like).
Back to context...
41.
For a more general survey of recordings of the Beethoven see Mark Katz,
‘Beethoven in the age of mechanical reproduction: The violin concerto on
record’, Beethoven forum, 10 (2003), 38-54. Back to context...
42.
The numbers must be considered very rough. For the faster slides the trace on
the spectrogram is almost as wide as the duration. It’s impossible to decide
without further research in perception whether the beginning and ends of
portamenti are perceived as vibrato cycles around the main frequency or as part
of the slide. In other words it’s anyone’s guess where exactly the slide should be
considered to begin and end. Measurements for Figure 3 were made in Sonic
Visualiser, those for Figure 4 in Spectrogram with a sample confirmed in Praat
using ‘Get selection length’. Back to context...
43.
Since this book was first published a valuable contribution on vibrato has been
made in Stijn Mattheij, 'Twentieth Century Violin Vibrato: a computer
examination of the development of performance style', MA dissertation, Open
University, 2009. On types of violin portamento according to treatises and
scores see Brown (1999), 558-87. With a clear spectrum display (so not always
with early recordings) it is possible to confirm, by looking for a gap in the slide,
 what kind of portamento is being used. Back to context...
44.
This sketch of fluctuating portamento usage is slightly more nuanced than
Milsom’s more general observation that portamento increases before it declines,
but we badly need a much more detailed study to understand the use of it before
the Second War in anything like enough depth. (Milsom (2003), 106; see also
Philip (1992), 229.) Back to context...
45.
Milsom (2003), 144, 164, 200-2, makes fascinating comparisons with early
recorded poetry; the comparison deserves much more investigation. Potentially
just as rewarding could be the comparison with early recorded acting. (I say a
little more about this in chapter 7 below.) Back to context...
46.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006). Back to context...
47.
On the need for multiple cues, overcoming the ambiguity inherent in each, see
Juslin, ‘Communicating emotion in music performance: a review and theoretical
framework’, in Juslin & Sloboda (2001) 309-37, esp. 324-5, and Juslin (2000).
Back to context...
48.
See also Leech-Wilkinson (2007). Back to context...
49.
For example in Philip (2004). Back to context...
©2009 King's College London, Strand, London W
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

6. Changing Performance Styles: Piano Playing

¶1 ‘What if’ games can be silly but revealing. What if recording had been invented
fifteen years earlier? We might well know how Liszt played. Fifty years earlier and
we’d have Chopin and Robert Schumann; seventy-five years, Beethoven. Just five years
and we might have Clara Schumann. We do have Brahms, almost inaudibly. 1 We do
have Rachmaninov and Bartok on disc, even Mahler on piano rolls. But how much
difference does it make? Curiously, the styles of unknown pianists seem much more
intriguing and important than those we know. Suppose that we didn’t have
Rachmaninov nor Bartok. It seems a fair bet that we’d be fascinated, certain that their
playing would reveal their music to us in a wholly new light, and that it is a tragedy that
no recording was made. I think it’s fair to say that Bartok’s playing does, but only in the
general sense that all recordings of modernist music from before c. 1950 are much more
flexible and expressive than the ideology of modernism would lead one to expect. And
perhaps to an extent Rachmaninov’s too, but only in the sense that recordings of late
romantic music from before c. 1950 tend to be less ‘romantic’ than we might expect. 2
Either way, wonderful and fascinating as their playing is, it’s not so revealing that were
all records to be lost in an instant we should, having known them before, feel the sense
of loss we feel now for Beethoven or Chopin. The uncomfortable truth is that we like to
imagine the past we don’t know as far more extraordinary than the past we do. So
whereas Rachmaninov and Bartok are people we can understand as something like
ourselves, just much more gifted, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt remain gods, or heroes
from mythology (as you prefer).

¶2 It’s worth bearing this in mind when we look at modern attempts to recover past
styles. For nineteenth-century music it’s really in piano playing that this has seemed to
matter most to modern musicians, perhaps because almost all the composers we most
want to understand were pianists. Yet attempts at finding out how they played have
argued forwards from the 18th century rather than backwards from the 20th. Of course
there are no recordings from the 18th century, and so what people have argued from are
styles already (re)created for the music of Bach and Mozart—styles based, if on
anything other than modern ‘early music’ traditions, on readings of treatises interacting
with (modern) personal taste. But if you do believe that Mozart and Beethoven played
in something like the style we enjoy from modern fortepianists, you have then to
explain how pianists got from there to Reinecke, Grieg, Pachmann, and Paderewski
(born 1824, 1843, 1848, 1860) whose recorded styles of playing are utterly unlike
Historically Informed Performance, both in details and in their ethical approach to the
composer’s score.

¶3 Of course, all those players were recording in the first decade of the twentieth
century, and their styles could have changed radically during their lifetimes. But it
would be unusual. Most performers documented across the twentieth century have not
changed that much, and since an ability or willingness to change one’s manner of being
musical is subject (presumably) to fairly deep psycho-physiological states—the way one
thinks about musical sounds and the way one has linked that thinking up with what
one’s body can do with a musical instrument—it’s quite hard to argue that different
stylistic or social conditions would produce a vastly different rate of change in people’s
personal performance styles. Some do change significantly—Artur Rubinstein springs
most readily to mind, and we’ve seen change (perhaps to a lesser extent) in the young
Kreisler—but it’s rare; and in a moment we’ll look at a pianist close to Brahms who
certainly didn’t.

¶4 So it seems on balance reasonable to assume that, there being so many elderly

pianists recording at the beginning of the twentieth century, a lot more than violinists or
(of course) singers, we do have quite a good body of evidence for piano playing in, let’s
say, the third quarter of the nineteenth century and perhaps a little earlier. It doesn’t
sound at all like modern fortepiano playing. If we’ve got anywhere near eighteenth-
century manners of playing in the HIP movement, then someone needs to explain what
it was that transformed piano playing between about 1820 and 1840. The alternative is
that HIP has significantly mistaken late eighteenth-century style. There’s some evidence
for that, and we’ll look at it in a moment. But first of all, because they give us a
coherent body of evidence, albeit fairly small and rather late, I’d like to look at the
pupils of Clara Schumann, conveniently collected together in a landmark LP and later
CD issue from Pearl. Before we begin, though, a word about schools of piano playing.

¶5 Early recorded pianists, like violinists, tend to be grouped into ‘schools’ according to
their descent from teacher to teacher. The International Piano Archives at Maryland
offers a convenient schematisation, from which the following very partial family tree
(Figure 10) is extracted. 3

Figure 10: Teacher/Pupil descent from Beethoven to Curzon and Rosen

¶6 What does it amount to? One could argue, without too much stretching of the
imagination, that Curzon and Rosen have things in common, especially a precise
attention to detail, but it’s perfectly obvious that they owe that to their own personalities
and not to Liszt, who is their latest shared ancestor in the descent from teacher to pupil.
One has only to listen to Leschetizky’s pupils to hear the contradictory range of
approaches that could be attributed to Liszt (or indeed to Beethoven) if this kind of
descent meant anything at all by itself. We badly need a detailed study of schools that
brings together memoires, teaching books, annotated editions and recordings. Though
the evidence from any one player is likely to be confusing, given enough data groupings
may well emerge. But until then we need to be wary of the whole notion of schools.
Whether there is anything common to a teacher’s pupils can be determined only by
listening and, supposing the evidence is available, by looking at their technique in
action. 4

¶7 Let’s suppose that some pupils do have a lot in common. How much can be
attributed to their teacher, and how much deduced about their teacher’s playing? (Those
are two questions, not one, because what one teaches and what one does are not always
perfectly synchronised.) Listening alone would be an imperfect route to an answer.
Typically the kinds of things piano pupils learn from a teacher involve ways of holding
the hand, fingerings, solutions to specific technical problems more easily seen than
heard, single features that for the listener are hard to separate out and that may be
masked or complicated by other features in a mature style. Often they are recognised
instantly by a fellow pupil because of their vivid memory of similar lessons, so
testimony may be valuable evidence. In the absence of visual evidence, or reliable and
clear testimony, reconstructing teachers’ styles from the common features of pupils’
needs very analytical listening, separating out details, and comparisons with pupils of
others (who should contrast), very wide and detailed knowledge—and a performer’s
experience—of the instrument and its performing tradition; and even then conclusions
are going to be speculative. Alternatively one needs meticulous scientific and statistical
analysis. Perhaps it could be done, in which case common features emerging that
weren’t common to most players and weren’t a by-product of other features might be
features of the teacher’s playing. But would it be worth the effort? The kinds of things
one was left with, if one were rigorous about it, would be small and open to having been
modified by all the rest, so how a teacher sounded in practice still couldn’t be known.
Pupils play differently, and that’s part of the way style changes. The history of
performance on record shows that above all else. The genetic analogy is obvious: family
trees tell us no more about the behaviour and tastes of our ancestors than they do about
piano teachers.

Pupils of Clara Schumann

¶8 All that said, I very much doubt that readers will now cease wondering how
Beethoven played, and nor can I. And that’s why, despite all my warnings about the
hopelessness of the task if one approaches it reasonably scientifically, I still want to talk
about the pupils of Clara Schumann. Because they do have important things in common,
and those things do make sense in relation to testimony; and while one cannot of course
come anywhere near the sound of her playing, let alone her father’s, Friedrich Wieck
(also Robert Schumann’s teacher), nevertheless there are still things one can reasonably
suggest were features of earlier nineteenth-century German style, and they’re not easily
compatible with modern assumptions.

¶9 Wieck’s emphasis was on legato line and singing tone, in other words on touch, 5 and
it was above all with the subtlety of her touch that Clara impressed critics. Shaw wrote,
in 1877, ‘If any words could do justice to the poetic expression and beauty of touch
which distinguishes Madame Schumann’s art, they are such as would appear
overstrained and out of place in these columns’ (his emphasis). 6 Her pupil Franklin
Taylor mentioned that ‘the peculiarly beautiful quality of tone she produced ... was
obtained by pressure with the fingers rather than by percussion ... [T]he fingers were
kept close to the keys and squeezed instead of striking them’. 7 Eugenie Schumann
(Clara and Robert’s youngest daughter), in a chapter of her autobiography entitled ‘An
Attempt’ to write about Clara’s style of playing, mentions how the Brahms Opp. 116
and 117 pieces, once Clara had lived with them for some time, became ‘plastic
creations, glowing with life and tenderness’. And she quotes a Brahms inscription, ‘To
Frau Klara Schumann, the greatest singer’, apt, so Eugenie felt, because of the way her
touch ‘conveyed like a beautiful human voice every shade of emotion.’ Eugenie
remembered, in the accompaniment of ‘Schöne Freunde’ from Liederkreis, ‘How the
legato of the melody hovered above that of the bass’, a remark that may make more
sense when we look at the separation of bass and melody in Fanny Davies’s playing in a
moment. 8

¶10 None of this can tell us anything precise about her sound, but, while bearing in
mind all the caveats outlined above, it is something to place alongside the sounds made
by her pupils. For what little it’s worth uncorroborated by sounding evidence, Clara
gave public concerts from 1830 until 1891, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that her
mature performance style was in place by the late 1830s (around the age of 20, since
she’d been performing at the highest level for some years already). As we’ve seen, that
is not to say that her style remained unchanged, but testimony in reviews and memoirs
to significant change in her performances has yet to be reported in the modern literature,
which (even the best of it) tends to recycle the same quotations. Further research on this
would be useful.

¶11 What of her pupils? Natalie Janotha studied with Schumann in the 1870s, was
recommended by her as a deputy, and was said to play ‘exactly like Clara Schumann’. 9
Bernard Shaw reviewed her in 1889 and found her playing ‘beautiful, suggestive,
poetic’, repeating also his previous opinion that ‘here at last was someone who could
replace Madame Schumann.’ He continued, prophetically, ‘Though Miss Janotha
occasionally breaks out in waywardness and displays of strength, suggestive of
possession by a fitful musical demon, yet I know no pianist of her generation whose
playing is more sustainedly and nobly beautiful than hers.’ 10 Her four short recordings
made in 1904, however, are disappointing, 11 despite a whirlwind Song Without Words
(Op. 67 no. 4, MM=c. 130, the same speed as Raoul Pugno recorded the previous year,
considerably faster than the 112 at which it’s commonly played today), and presumably
reflect the condition in which Shaw found her in 1892, ‘idly displaying her rare
dexterity of hand and her capricious individuality of style without a ray of thought or
feeling’. 12

Fanny Davies

¶12 Much more evidence survives in recordings by Fanny Davies, who studied with
Schumann from 1883, Ilona Eibenschütz, and Adelina de Lara (both from 1886).
(Leonard Borwick, reported to be her favourite pupil, left no recordings.) Of these three,
Fanny Davies (born 1861) now seems, from her recordings, the most able and it is
easiest to imagine, listening to her, the use to which Schumann might have put her
legendary touch. 13 Davies’s recording of Robert Schumann’s Davidsbundlertänze, book
2 no. 5, is a case in point. (Sound File 20 (wav file)) 14 The three layers, melody,
ascending arpeggio/scale figures, bass, are differentiated by loudness with unusual
regularity. Using a spectrum analyser one can see how precisely she is able to match the
loudness and the balance of upper partials between notes within each layer. (We’ll
discuss this further in chapter 8.) Franklin Taylor’s description of Schumann’s tone and
‘squeezing’ of the keys is easy to relate to Davies’s playing, as is Amy Fay’s account of
the consistency of her pianissimo throughout a Mendelssohn Song Without Words, 15
and Eugenie’s memory of her mother playing chords of equal strength yet exquisitely
mellow tone. 16 Just as interesting, though, in the wider picture of turn-of-the-century
style, is the emphasis on legato—inculcated by Wieck and which incidentally Clara
Schumann particularly admired in Mendelssohn’s playing. 17 Early recorded pianists
achieve extreme legato by overlapping notes, which can happen in Davies even where
staccato dots are notated: these tend to be read as ‘less rubato’ rather than ‘shortened’.
In the context of rubato playing, that momentary strictness of time is perceived as
relatively marked, an equivalent effect to staccato in more regular playing. What
happens, in other words, is that the player moves the whole gamut of touch a step
towards the legato side, just as in post-Second World War pianism it tended to be
moved a step towards staccato (a large step, in some cases, especially in Bach).

¶13 One aspect of layering and of rubato that is absolutely fundamental to early
recorded piano style is the playing of bass notes somewhat before the notes they
support. 18 Davies again offers particularly carefully-calculated examples, and it’s worth
looking into them in more detail before we try to understand the more extensive use of
this technique elsewhere. Sound File 21 (wav file) is her recording of the last of the
Davidsbundlertänze book 2 no. 9. 19 Figure 11 shows a score annotated with the timings
of each beat and (beneath the staff) the length of time by which the bass anticipates the
beat to which it belongs. 20 How do we know that the bass is early and the other notes
not late? By looking at the consistency of note lengths between passages with bass
anticipation and without, by considering whether the bass or melody sounds alone, and
by listening: it’s generally fairly obvious which way one perceives it.

Figure 11: Fanny Davies, Schumann: Davidsbundlertänze, book 2 no. 9

¶14 The first thing to say is that the differences between these numbers, though they
look large, are small in time: they count hundredths of a second, so the difference in the
bass anticipations between 12, 13 and 14 is inaudible, 17 can just be perceived as
fractionally noticeable, 24 definitely so. 09 is almost inaudible and may be accidental.
In the beat durations a difference between 63 and 37 is very noticeable, between 45 and
49 not. Overall, then, there is a very consistent rhythm of beats that is way off strict 3/4,
a long–short–fairly long that gives shape to the notationally monotonous sequence of
crotchet beats. Harmonically the second beat simply fills in the harmony belonging to
the first, so that it’s almost an appendage in structural terms rather than an independent
event; the third beats lead into the first so are slightly shorter; and it’s these facts about
the composition that Davies’s performance values and communicates. Working within
this framework we can now begin to understand some of the details. Early bass notes
give weight to a chord and especially to its melody note that comes after. 21 The relative
weights again reflect and communicate Davies’s perception of the composition.

¶15 In bars 3 to 6 the most noticeable anticipation is of the C-sharp in bar 5, marking
the point at which the bass begins to move; it’s reduced in bar 6, a point of local arrival
but insignificant tonality (although this anticipation is so small that it may be
accidental), and increases again as the bass moves on, with the longest anticipation
before the first dominant (of the dominant) in bar 9, reflecting a quasi-crescendo of
harmonic intensification towards the repetition of this phrase (bars 10 into 3). The
dominant itself is left unaccented, perhaps in order not to emphasise the dominant
cadence too strongly at the first time ending: it gets a normal anticipation the second
time around. The second statement of the phrase is treated regularly until the much
larger anticipation that emphasises the structural juncture with the next section, starting
in bar 11. Having made a large anticipation there Davies continues them for another
three bars, perhaps for coherent continuity (it’s become a motif, in John Rink’s terms) 22
before dropping it entirely as the harmonic intensification goes into reverse and the
music winds down towards the principal dominant pause at bars 19-20. Again the new
section (bar 21) is marked with bass emphasis. Here the harmonic sequence repeats the
opening, and so does Davies’s pattern of bass anticipations (showing that the absence at
bar 4 was deliberate, incidentally), before it is again dropped from bar 27, where the
second beats need more emphasis. It returns to make a structural harmonic point at bars
30-1, and momentarily at bar 47 for hypermetrical emphasis, and finally at bar 53 where
Davies separates out the minim sixth, emphasising its role as a drone above the bass
melody.

¶16 That was boring to read, but it makes the point that it’s not hard to see good
structural reasons for almost all Davies’s early bass notes. Naturally, her treatment of
beat lengths overall is just as logically related to the score. (See the numbers above the
staves in Figure 11.) The first note of bar 3 is much shorter the second time round
because we are now in the middle of a larger musical unit, and the third beats are longer
than the first as Davies emphasises the slurred melodic figure rather than the basic
structure the second time through. The first beat of bar 12 is longer than usual in order
to make a point about the expressive size of the interval leading up to a much higher
note. The ritardando is absolutely strictly observed, as one would expect given Clara
Schumann’s insistence to Fanny Davies that she should ‘Play what is written; play it as
it is written. It all stands there.’ 23 And Davies changes from unequal beats to equally
spaced notes for the written out arpeggio in bars 19-20, emphasising its stillness (and
that the purpose of unequal beats is to give vitality to the score). Speeding up is gradual
through bars 21-23; regularity recurs for the sequence in bars 27-30 (the lengths of beats
2 and 3 recur; see bars 37-40 for a comparable situation). In bar 32 a longer first beat
emphasises the first occurrence of the dotted motif (and see bar 42, second beat for the
next variant of it). At the end the ritardando is again begun absolutely precisely. Once
again, all this makes sense. What might in later times be dismissed as wayward rubato is
in fact meticulously deployed in order to communicate facts about the composition. 24

Ilona Eibenschütz

¶17 Rubato is more (or, depending on your point of view, less) than structural in the
playing of Ilona Eibenschütz. She was born in 1873, which makes her twelve years
younger than Davies, and was considered to be somewhat wild by Clara Schumann and
by her fellow pupils. 25 Nevertheless, Brahms seems to have taken to her, he gave her
the first private performance of his Klavierstücke Opp. 118 and 119 in 1892, and it was
she who gave the first performance of Op. 119 in London in 1894. That makes her
recording of no. 2 rather interesting historically: musically it is remarkable. 26
 Figure 12: Rubato in Brahms's Intermezzo in E minor, Op. 119 no. 2:
Eibenschütz (1952) and W. Kempff (c. 1964)

¶18 Figure 12 compares Eibenschütz’s tempo in the Intermezzo in E minor, Op. 119 no.
2, with Wilhelm Kempff’s. 27 Kempff was born in 1895, so he’s a full generation
younger, and his performance, at least in terms of tempo (articulation is distinctly
choppy and would have appalled Clara Schumann), represents something more like a
typical modern performance. At any rate it gives us a rough measure of modern
normality against which to place Eibenschütz. (In contrast to most published tempo
graphs, slower speeds are towards the top of the Y axis, faster towards the bottom, since
intuitively one is inclined to read uphill as slowing down, downhill as speeding up. This
way round the graph is easier to apply to an imaginary performance, or to follow against
Eibenschütz’s.) Only the first 17 bars are analysed here, in the interests of space, but
they give an adequate picture. It’s immediately obvious that compared to Kempff’s
more modern performance, Eibenschütz’s rubato is hair-raising, mapping out not just
structural points in the composition but also momentary inflections of pitch and
harmony which seem to her more pathetic (emphasised by slowing and getting quieter)
or vigorous (faster and louder). The triplet episode, bars 13-17, in which so many linger,
she finds increasingly animated till it is rounded off with a huge ritardando emphasising
the chromatically descending inner voice at bar 17, before racing off again with the
semiquaver off-beats in the following section. And so on. That this is what Brahms
enjoyed, and the first audience heard, gives us a lot to think about. It might be tempting
to try to argue that Eibenschütz’s playing in 1952, when this recording was made (she
was 79), might not have had much to do with her playing in 1894. But in fact her 1962
recording of Brahms’s Waltz, Op. 39 no. 15 is remarkably like her 1903 recording of
the same piece, 28 confirming again the broad stability of most players’ style through
their lives; and so we simply have to accept that this is approximately how Op. 119 no.
2 sounded when it was young.

¶19 Eibenschütz seems always to have been an impulsive player, and one would not
expect everyone to have played it like this. But then so was Brahms. Eugenie Schumann
wrote in her autobiography:

It was not always perfectly enjoyable to hear Brahms play his own compositions, but it
was always highly interesting. .. He played the themes with great emphasis and
curiously free rhythms ... so that one had the impression of strong light and shade.
When he came to passionate parts, it was as though a tempest were tossing clouds,
scattering them in magnificent fury. 29

¶20 I said of Fanny Davies that it was ‘easiest to imagine, listening to her, the use to
which [Clara] Schumann might have put her legendary touch’, and one might be
tempted to say something similar of Eibenschütz, Brahms and wide rubato. But of
course its being easy to imagine doesn’t indicate that something existed. Davies’s
ability to use that touch to produce multiple layers isn’t shared to quite the same extent
by Eibenschütz or de Lara, and Eibenschütz’s rubato isn’t like Davies’s or de Lara’s, so
we must be cautious about including either in the equation when trying to say anything
reliable about Clara Schumann’s or Brahms’s own styles of playing (though at least for
Brahms we have that one semi-audible recording). What they do always have in
common, though, is this expressive rubato, varying the length of beats from moment to
moment in line with the shifting character of the composition and the changing
relationship between melodic, harmonic and metrical direction and emphasis; also their
habitual use of arpeggiated chords; the slight but ever-present dislocation between
melody and accompaniment.

¶21 Does that suggest that these were characteristic of Clara Schumann’s playing also?
Well, it may, and one could easily read Eugenie Schumann’s testimony in that light, but
equally these features may have changed somewhat through changes in general style
since Schumann’s youth. We can’t be sure that they go back to c. 1830. What we can
say is that they are not inconsistent with anything said about her playing, or indeed the
playing of other pianists from early in the nineteenth century. We must be prepared to
consider the possibility that early nineteenth-century playing was much more expressive
and less metronomic and neat, and certainly less highly articulated (remember all the
emphasis on legato and melodic line) than modern HIP approaches would wish to
suggest.

¶22 What this case study shows, it seems to me, is that we can’t know anything much
for certain about unrecorded playing styles. But if we are careful, and try to stick to the
evidence and avoid too much hopeful guesswork, we can use traditional humanities
research methods—assembling a selection of the evidence to argue a point—to sort
through incomplete data with a view to renewing our sense of the possibilities for what
might have happened in the past. And a fresh look at the possibilities can help to free us
from some of the dogmas that constitute current approaches to performing music in the
light of historical information. In the end, in other words, these kinds of studies of
recordings, arguing backwards, don’t permit reliable historical discoveries; they do help
us rethink our own view of the music. And they do that because, however hard we try,
it’s extraordinarily difficult to free ourselves from the desire to know how people played
in the past. We need to admit, though, that it suits us rather well not to know too
exactly. When we know, as we do for early twentieth-century playing, there’s
remarkably little appetite for reproducing the style ourselves. When we don’t, we try to
reproduce it as hard as we possibly can. In other words, we deceive ourselves: really it’s
ideas to direct our own approach that we want, not models to copy.

¶23 And ideas are exactly what this kind of historical research filled out with
imagination, in which musicology specialises, gives us so well. At its very best,
generating performances that do all they can to adopt what's known from the
documentary remains, however unpalatable to modern musical taste, practice-led
research into the performance styles of eras closely pre-dating recording can have real
historical value. Whether the results will ever reach commercial performance, where
musicians' convenience (what can be achieved in limited rehearsal) and public taste
(what people will pay to hear) run hand in hand, remains to be seen.

The oldest recorded pianists

¶24 The pupils of Clara Schumann make a useful case study also because their playing
is by no means the most different among early recorded pianists from what we’re used
to today. They’re not the oldest pianists on record, nor, with the possible exception of
Eibenschütz’s Op. 119 no. 2, the most surprising. If we want to reach as far back as
possible then we have to look to reproducing piano rolls. The manifold problems with
these as evidence were outlined in chapter 3: they are a very questionable source, but
when there is nothing else they can be hard to resist, particularly so in the case of one of
the very oldest recorded pianists because his playing is so extraordinary. Carl Reinecke
was born in 1824, was a friend of Mendelssohn and the Schumanns, and later taught at
the Leipzig conservatory where his pupils included Grieg, Sullivan, and the conductors
Muck and Weingartner. He was recorded onto Welte Mignon rolls in 1905. In his
performance of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 537 there are
interesting decorations, some of them Mozartian, others Chopinesque; but much more
striking is the timing of the written notes. Most chords are arpeggiated upwards, so
consistently that one wonders whether this is harpsichord technique surviving into
nineteenth-century playing, or nineteenth-century pianism applied to Mozart. The notes
of the melody are almost always delayed, sometimes by as much as 1/5 of a second,
which may not sound very much but, when one is used to notes placed vertically in a
score being played exactly together, seems a very long time as one listens. If one isn’t
familiar with this kind of playing it can seem as if the recording has somehow mis-
synchronised the hands, but in fact the sequence of notes through the rest of the texture
makes clear that that’s not so (and indeed technically it would be a very unlikely
accident). The fact is that a lot of the oldest pianists we can hear did play with far more
disjunction of melody and bass than Clara Schumann’s pupils. In Reinecke’s case, the
regularity of the arpeggiation and of the accompaniment beat lead us strongly to the
sense that the melody is late rather than the bass early, and that too tends to increase the
sense of alienation for a modern listener, who is at least familiar with the idea of a low
bass note sounding early when an impossible stretch forces it. Reinecke’s playing can’t
be explained away like that, and the fact that he is playing Mozart, for us such a regular
composer, simply makes the strangeness of his playing more acute. The thought that
there might be a historical cause in his youth is almost frightening because of the
wholesale rethink it would force about everything we imagine as Classical.

¶25 On the other hand, we can also find among early recordings a considerable number
of pianists who play in a manner much more like our own. Grieg (b. 1843, studied in
Germany) we have already looked at in another context in chapter 3. Raoul Pugno (b.
1852, studied in France) trained under Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin whom Cortot
remembered as giving the vivid impression of passing on Chopin’s ideas: 30 he plays
with the rubato that almost all share but without nearly so much dislocation of melody
and bass (in fact it’s rather rare in his playing). 31 Aleksander Michalowski (b. 1851,
studied in Germany but also sought out a Polish Chopin tradition), also plays more
regularly than the Clara Schumann pupils (let alone Reinecke), though still with much
rubato and with extremes of speed that are very commonly found at this time. 32 This
puts into some perspective the more wayward playing of the much more prolific
Vladimir de Pachmann (b. 1848), who studied in Vienna with a pupil of Czerny (which
just shows how little can be assumed about teachers and their grandpupils). 33 Examples
include adding material, sometimes several bars, to the beginnings or ends of pieces,
virtuoso cadenzas in the middle, passing notes to make a passage more pathetic, as well
as the more common octave extensions in the bass that one finds in many pianists of his
and later generations. His rubato goes much further than average, though often to
strikingly poetic effect. And Pachmann does not shrink from thoroughly changing a
composer’s instructions in order to make an effect that he finds interesting. A case in
point is one of his recordings of Chopin’s ‘Minute’ Waltz, Op. 64 no. 1, which, as he
explains to the audience, he starts playing straight, then with pedal, a slower middle
section, staccato ‘a la Pagannini’, legato ‘a la Chopin’, finishing with a little turn. 34 The
whole thing takes 2’41”. 35
¶26 Pachmann was an extreme case, exacerbated by his endearingly high opinion of
himself which he tended to express in approving remarks at the ends of items in his
concerts and occasionally on disc, 36 but the fact is that changing a composer’s text was
absolutely normal among many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pianists. Our
literal, often pious attitude to the notation developed only gradually during the first half
of the last century. Performers before then took the much more pragmatic view that if a
change would make a more moving effect in the context of the way they’d shaped their
performance then it was appropriate. It was their responsibility to move the audience as
profoundly as they could: the composer’s text was just one element that contributed to
the result. As we saw in chapter 2, it’s a perfectly reasonable view, for which the
justification comes in the sound and the way that sound makes listeners feel. If we
understand music as what it feels like then there can be no watertight objection to the
means used to generate good feeling, provided that they do no serious harm to anyone;
and whether one sees the dead composer as harmed by changes to his text is a matter
only of belief.

¶27 Changes along these lines (albeit less far-reaching) are to be found all over early
recorded pianism: octave doublings, chords in place of notes, glissandi in place of
scales, modulating improvisations between items, elaborations of all sorts; the line
between interpretation and arrangement is impossible to place. At the same time there
are pianists (Leopold Godowski a particularly striking example on account of his
rhythmic as well as textual strictness) who play it straight, as straight as a modern
pianist, reminding us that elaboration is a matter of temperament until the practice
ceases altogether after the Second World War.

¶28 Another thing made possible by a more sceptical view of notation was a variety of
types of triple meter. When we see 3/4 today we tend to read it as more or less three
equal length notes, with some kind of emphasis (which may be provided by the
composition rather than the performance) on the first. A hundred years ago there were
many different types of three beats in a bar. We’ve seen Davies playing long-short-
fairly long; and I mentioned in passing in chapter 2 above Ignacy Friedman (b. 1882,
studied in Poland, Leipzig and Vienna) playing Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 24 no. 4 with
the motif short-long-fairly long, as much as 2:5:4 on occasion. 37 An earlier example
(one of a large number from which one can choose almost at random) would be Alfred
Grünfeld (b. 1852, studied in Prague) recorded in 1905. 38 His Mazurka, Op. 33 no. 4
uses a typical two-bar rhythmic motif, medium-long-fairly long / very short-long-
medium (roughly 5:7:6 / 4:8:6). Paderewski plays Chopin’s Waltz, Op. 31 no. 1
(especially on disc, slightly less so on roll) relatively evenly, but with a tendency
towards medium-longer-short. By contrast, the last section of his Mazurka, Op. 24 no. 4
tends more towards slightly longer-medium-shorter (e.g. bars 116-20: 6:7:4 / 4:4:3 /
5:4:3 / 4:3:2 / 4:4:3). 39 Paderewski was born in 1860 and studied in Poland; Friedman
too was Polish, but it’s a moot point as to whether Polish origin gives pianists more
insight into Chopin playing.

¶29 One could continue over many pages to cite examples of comparable patterns of
beat lengths. Most of Chopin’s output is in 3/4, and there’s clearly room for a study of
early recorded performances that looks both for consistency within genres and (more
likely to produce interesting results) in the relationship between rhythm and structure. It
will need to be statistically based, however, because it’s as easy as you may now expect
to single out pianists who place emphases in different places in the bar. The real point
was not to be formulaic but to be interesting, to make the music live or speak or sing, in
other words to make it vital, like a living human with responses and feelings that change
from moment to moment in response to incoming data (which in this case includes the
score). And that meant constantly changing, and in constantly varying gradations, any
parameter that one’s instrument was able to change: for pianists loudness and timing,
and colour when humanly possible.

Benno Moiseiwitsch

¶30 The emphasis placed on legato by so many nineteenth-century teachers makes the
legato playing of early recorded pianists particularly worth studying, and this is another
area ripe for research. Benno Moiseiwitsch (b. 1890, studied in Russia, then with
Leschetitzky in London) offers a particularly clear example in his 1940 recording of
Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 9. no. 2 (Sound File 22) (wav file), 40 though many others
would do just as well. There are several aspects to his legato technique, some are
relatively straightforward, others less so. In the first category come the continuation of
notes through overlapping them—in other words holding down a note until after the
next has been begun to sound—and half pedalling, pressing down the sustaining pedal
just enough to allow strings that were hit loudest to continue to vibrate without leaving
quieter accompanying notes freely vibrating as well. Using these techniques it’s quite
normal for Moiseiwitsch to keep notes sounding long after the end of their written
duration without having to resort to full pedal, so that the texture remains clear and yet
sustained.

¶31 More interesting, because it’s so unexpected, is his ability to make notes get louder
well after they’ve been struck. One might think this is impossible on a piano, and for
notes sounding alone it is. Once the key has struck the string the note increases in
amplitude during the attack phase very rapidly, far too rapidly for one to be aware of
anything but the striking note, and then it immediately starts to decay, quickly at first
and then gradually more slowly. Clearly, after the attack phase, an individual note
cannot get louder. But some of Moiseiwitsch’s long melody notes in this Nocturne do:
in bars 2 and 6 the b”-flat, in bars 4 and 8 the e”-flat, in bar 9 the c”, and so on.
Spectrogram analysis (of which more in chapter 8) shows at once how this works. 41 It
depends on several factors: 1) the composer’s score providing subsequent notes in the
accompaniment whose partials have the same frequency as the fundamental of the
continuing melody note—for example an accompaniment note an octave (preferably), a
twelfth or two octaves below the melody (or all of these); 2) the accompaniment notes
being struck loud enough for their partials to audibly reinforce the melody’s decaying
fundamental but soft enough not to overwhelm it with the loudness of their own; 3) the
melody note having been struck loud enough to continue clearly above the changing
accompaniment but soft enough for the partial of the new accompaniment note to
audibly increase it; 4) the resonances of the particular piano that’s being played.
Pedalling 5) may also play a role. So it’s very difficult to do, requiring minute control
and very careful listening, and it’s only possible when the harmonic context allows it.
But in a piece like the E-flat Nocturne, with long melody notes reinforced by consonant
arpeggiated accompaniment, the basic conditions are in place: all that’s needed is a
superlative pianist to make long melody notes come twice. In theory there’s nothing
period-specific about this, it needn’t be a product of a particular performance style; but
it’s a technique that flourishes within a fundamentally legato attitude to piano playing in
which beautiful connections from note to note are valued more, and contribute more to
the shaping of longer continuities, than their articulation. Consequently one hears it
more before the Second World War than since; but even so, as with most features
discussed thus far, not all pianists practise it by any means.

¶32 If we look at early twentieth-century piano playing as a whole, then, and glance
across at violin playing and singing, we can see a variety of practice that may surprise
us if we imagine music at that time reflecting a socially constrained world. Far from it;
playing was more expressive than it was to become in more modern, ‘liberated’ times,
and it was much less bound by convention. Far more was acceptable than half a century
(or indeed a whole century) later. Like singers and violinists, pianists valued melodic
continuity and beauty of line more than articulation or rhythmic exactness. (One can
understand, perhaps, why Stravinsky’s insistence on rhythm and literal representation of
the score had to be repeated so insistently, and how that whole attitude seemed modern.)
42
The flexibility of music in performance was understood as key to its expressivity. It’s
not impossible that there was a process of expressive inflation during the latter part of
the nineteenth century that led to the sorts of performances we’ve been examining. That
would make the reaction of the modernists easier to comprehend. Certainly, pianists
active in the 20s and 30s are, like singers of the Lotte Lehmann generation, possible to
see as coming at the end of a tradition; the last and in some ways the most intense of the
musical poets, soon to be superceded by the young actors of the post-War years.

Alfred Cortot

¶33 Alfred Cortot (b. 1877) can very well stand as representative of this last piano-
poetic generation. Like Lehmann he was one of the most intensely expressive
performers on record, and like her he wrote in detail about the interpretation of specific
pieces as an extension of his lessons and masterclasses. He studied in Paris with Emile
Descombes, a pupil of Chopin, 43 which may or may not explain his reverence for
Chopin’s intentions and his repeated emphasis on the need to reproduce the ‘aristocratic
reserve’ he believed to be characteristic of Chopin’s playing, even to the extent of
advising, in the Prelude Op. 28 no. 12, that one should hold back in order not to exceed
the limitations of Chopin’s technique. 44 The modern listener may sometimes wonder
what Cortot’s Chopin playing would have been like if it were unrestrained; and it’s hard
for us to understand how one can square such profound respect for a historical style
with rewriting passages of Chopin’s scores to produce a better effect. 45 For Cortot,
though, it was Chopin’s effect that he was producing, just doing it better. Examples
include extending cadenzas, replacing single notes with chords, and enlarging chords
(all these examples from Cortot’s fascinating annotated edition of the Ballades). 46 And
in performance they are undoubtedly thrilling, not to be wished away but rather to be
appreciated as absolutely right in context, the context of a Cortot performance. Perhaps
the most evocative example comes in the Prelude, no. 15, bars 71-5, five rumbles of
distant thunder in the bass leading into the final return of the opening material which it
is hard to wish were not there. 47 (Sound File 23 (wav file) gives the 1926 recording.) 48
Hardly less effective is the unnotated crescendo that begins his performances of the
twenty-second Prelude and gives it a force it lacks in any more literal representation.
(Sound File 24) (wav file) 49

¶34 Notoriously Cortot was unbothered by wrong notes if the spirit of the performance
was right (Op. 28 no. 22 is by no means the worst example, incidentally), and in so
many of his recordings one has to be extremely unsympathetic to the beauties in order
to object fundamentally to the mistakes. In his book on Chopin Cortot wishes that more
performers would ‘leave the problems of technique where they belong - in a place of
secondary importance - and allow... them to place their imagination rather than their
fingers at the service of the inner significance of the music.’ 50 The deliberate changes
and the accidents all belong to a consistent approach to making music from raw
compositions. Cortot had an exceptionally acute aural imagination that, applied to his
perception of the shifting meanings dormant in a composition, and tied to a fine control
of timbre through touch, timing and pedalling, led him to shape and colour every
passing moment of a score. He also had a Lehmann-like ability to conjure up effects in
words, and an intellect that enabled him technically to describe what he was doing and
why. He makes a very good subject for study, therefore, if one wants to understand how
the most expressive piano playing works.

¶35 His 1928 recording (the second of five) 51 of Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, Op. 28
no. 4, makes a nice example (Sound File 25 (wav file)), 52 not least because it has never
been published before (it turned up unexpectedly in a copy of the 1926 set in the King’s
Sound Archive), but also because performances of the piece have been studied many
times, and comparisons can be made and the replicability of earlier findings tested. 53
Eric Clarke, in a thought-provoking study (Clarke 1995), used modern performances
captured via a MIDI piano to examine the relationship between tempo and dynamic
changes and the representation of musical structure. Among other things, Clarke
showed how the two performances of Op. 28 no. 4 by Robin Bowman offer contrasting
readings of the musical structure by using similarly expressive tempo and dynamic
changes in different musical contexts, and also a similar reading of a musical structure
using different patterns of change. Change in tempo and/or loudness, it seems, is more
significant than the kind of change (louder or softer, faster or slower). It follows that
musical structures do not require for successful performance particular patterns of note
lengths and loudnesses: they only require that changes be made in patterns that relate to
structure. Within that very broad requirement, the performer has an inconceivably large
number of possibly combinations of timing, loudness, and (in vibrato, portamento, and
expressive intonation) pitch to combine in ways that feel good. The next interesting area
for study, then, concerns that ‘feeling good’: why do particular combinations seem to
work in particular performance contexts? Cortot may help us begin to find some
answers because his moment-by-moment combinations are so striking and so easy to
observe.

Figure 13: Alfred Cortot, Chopin Prelude in E minor, Op. 28 no. 4, 1928
recording: durations and intensities

¶36 Figure 13 offers an edition annotated with the lengths (in hundredths of a second)
and loudnesses (in dB) of each horizontal event in this 1928 recording. (It would be
easy to turn the numbers into a graph, but actually a graph tells us nothing that they do
not; though, turning them into coordinated graphs of loudness and duration could make
a nice classroom exercise.) There are a number of points where Cortot plays the melody
note late, 54 and they’re worth looking at more closely. In most cases he doesn’t just
delay the melody note, he also extends the accompaniment chord so that the melody
note has at least (usually more than) the full length it would have had if played on time.
Note that, unlike in the Davies example above, it’s not a question of playing the bass
early. Cortot actually inserts a lot of extra time into a sequence of events that is
otherwise fairly regular. One might think this would produce a halting rhythm, the
music proceeding in fits and starts, but actually it doesn’t sound like that. Why not?

¶37 For Cortot the falling semitone crotchet-dotted minim figure, c’’-b’, c’’-b’, c’’-b’,
b’-flat-a’, b’-a’ etc., is the focus of attention, and the way he plays it forms a kind of
motto shape that applies to many aspects of the piece. To understand his performance
we need to understand this shape. The first note is a peak from which the second falls
away—generally the first is a step up from the preceding note so that in context the
shape resembles so many one finds in music and in life: rising and then falling. Like
peaks in other domains it takes some effort to reach up to it, but one descends from it
more easily. Even if one didn’t know what Cortot had said about the piece (and we’ll
look at that in a minute) it would be evident that he imagines it as like a sigh: a longer
and louder breath in, expelled in a shorter and quietening breath out. It would be an
imaginative or contrary pianist who read it much differently, given the chromatically
descending accompaniment sequence of 7ths to 6ths.

¶38 The difference comes rather in the way pianists represent this figure in sound. For
Cortot the figure is the focus and goal of every bar; but, as the discussion of Clarke
suggested, there are various ways of representing it even within one coherent
performance: what counts is that there be a change in at least one dimension of the
sound in order to mark it. Which direction the change takes, and in which dimension, is
open to the performer to decide according to the local context. It would be possible to
do nothing at all, and simply leave it to Chopin, representing the notated score literally
and relying on the changing harmony and melodic line to do all the expressive work. In
more recent decades, say between 1950 and 1980, pianists have tended more in that
direction. But for Cortot the task was to make that shape as expressive as it could
possibly be. And that means making large changes in more than one dimension while
maintaining a sense of continuity and general consistency of mood (albeit with changes
of intensity along the way). It’s a question of how far he can go without losing that
coherence.

¶39 Cortot creates several very noticeable gestures (or dynamic shapes) 55 that recur,
matched to recurrences of compositional motifs. We’ll look more closely at expressive
gestures in chapter 8. My aim here is to show how expressive gestures can be used not
(or, if we take Cortot’s programme for this performance seriously, not only) to shape
particular moments in ways that model sounds or feelings from life (which is one of the
things we’ll be doing in chapter 8) but rather to show how tempo/loudness envelopes
can be used repeatedly throughout a performance to do music-structural as well as
emotionally expressive work.

¶40 Here again, just as in Fanny Davies’s performance of the Davidsbundlertanz, it’s
helpful to invoke John Rink’s notion of ‘performance motif’. What, using the more
neutral terminology of acoustics, I’ve begun by calling tempo/loudness envelopes, are
easily conceptualised as motifs, especially because they are tied throughout the
performance to the motifs so easily seen in the score. As with composition motifs, the
recurrences of these envelopes generate consistency, yet—and this gives them an
additional and essential dimension—each statement contains within itself change that
does expressive work, and does it again and again as the envelopes repeat. Outstanding,
as I’ve just suggested, is the treatment of the ‘sigh’ figure. As Figure 13 shows (with
perhaps unnecessary precision, but unquestionably shows), the associated performance
gesture consists of delayed melodic upbeat, anticipated by the left-hand accompaniment,
falling into a delayed downbeat. The first and usually the second note are louder than
their surroundings, the second note less so than the first, assisting the modelling of a
sigh. The delayed onsets separate the melody from the accompaniment, adding to the
motif’s prominence and (paradoxically) to the sense of melodic legato. The motif is
elongated when the composition provides extra notes, as at the end of bar 7 but also bars
11 and 19 where Cortot gives the grace note the greatest weight (the score in Figure 13
gives not Chopin’s notation but a notation closer to Cortot’s performance). And it’s
elongated also where the extra notes are concealed or differently placed, right at the end
of bar 10 and in the middle of bar 18, at the start of bar 12 and at its end in the elongated
c’, as well as at the related end of bar 20.

¶41 A second motif that recurs all through serves to shape the left-hand accompaniment.
The first quaver is lengthened, starting an acceleration pulled back through the fifth to
the seventh quavers, with the seventh as the goal, underpinning and slightly anticipating
the melodic crotchet. The acceleration/deceleration in each bar is hard not to sense as
inhalation/exhalation. The pattern is applied to the melody in the solo bar 12 and to the
turn in bar 16. But see too how it is changed after the climax, so as to follow the
harmony changes, so that the louder melodic line that Cortot has been making out of the
top notes of the left hand right from the start now becomes the main source of melodic
motion. The continuity this provides holds together the compositional liquidation or
dissolution through these bars, completed by Cortot’s very individual decision (made
consistently in all his performances of the piece) to play the penultimate bar’s chords
somewhat staccato.

¶42 Cortot has, then, a very clear sense of the composition’s structure but his aim seems
not to be to represent the structure—not simply to give an account of it—but rather to
bring it to life by making it breathe more deeply, obviously and evocatively than would
later be considered well-mannered.

¶43 Now let’s look at how Cortot uses these motifs at key moments in unexpected
ways. The c’–b figure from bars 3-4 is much quieter, the b in fact no louder than its
surroundings. Compared to the pattern established till now the marked lengthening but
sudden quietening of the ‘sigh’ figure completely confounds expectations, yet it remains
part of a coherent process of speeding up and slowing down through the bar and of
gradual decrescendo. Its effect demonstrates vividly how powerfully expectations are
involved in our response to moments in performances. We have only three bars behind
us, but we have configured our expectations sufficiently to the pattern already set up to
be easily effected by this change in just one dimension of it. The sigh is long and quiet,
and evokes a deeper sense of despair than one might think possible from a few
microseconds more and a few decibels less. It emphasises just how responsive we can
be to minute changes in sound (for excellent evolutionary reasons), and how much the
smallest details of a performance matter. The boldness, precision, and emotional effect
of these sorts of gestures are key to Cortot’s personal style.

¶44 Something similar happens, perhaps slightly less successfully because of the
repetition, at bars 10-11. Then, after the melodic cadenza in bar 12, bar 13 and what
follows comes a much stronger contrast than one would expect from the score. The
whole texture is much louder, and the lengthenings around the fourth and first beats
become smaller, creating an acceleration. The weight of the climax is greater than one
might expect, supplemented by Cortot playing the left-hand Bs at the start of bar 17 an
octave lower than notated. (And incidentally he also adds a central B in the final left-
hand chord of the piece.)

¶45 Cortot is going beyond what’s normal for us, and indeed beyond what was normal
for most pianists of his or the preceding generation, because he’s not just marking up
the formal properties of the piece in a manner consistent with period style. He’s giving
moments expressive properties well beyond those required by the representation of
compositional form. The piece’s larger AA’ form is marked, certainly, but the A and A’
are contrasted far more than even Cortot’s contemporaries might normally have thought
was required. Clearly Cortot, like Lehmann, is working within an expressive world in
which nothing is too extreme as a representation of deeply felt emotion provided only
that it makes sense within the stylistic world of the whole performance.

¶46 There are many more points that could be made about this recording and about the
data derived from it in Figure 13. It’s easy to see similar patterns recurring throughout
the performance and operating simultaneously on different levels. Readers familiar with
classical music analysis will not have failed to notice that many of the things I’ve said
about this performance are the sorts of things that people used to say about scores when
analysis was less unfashionable than now. I can’t help that, though. These are the things
that this performance does. It’s not impossible that analysts in search of motivic
working and unity were led along, without realising it, by the extent to which
performance contributed to the sense that those things mattered. Perhaps one is really
more aware of them at work on one in the performance dimension than in the score; in
other words, things that performers were doing we tended to ascribe to scores alone. I
argued along these lines in the opening chapter, and this is a good example of why. It’s
also possible that current fashion is failing to do justice to the strength of classical
analytical views of how music works, though I’m happy to leave that to analysts to
argue more fully.

¶47 I don’t think that there can be any reasonable doubt, though, that convincing
performances are in many respects coherent, however unexpected they may be: one
couldn’t take a phrase from a performance of this piece by Cziffra or Godowsky or
Gould and drop it into a Cortot recording and get any kind of sense (though there are
any number of examples of editors making less obvious, more plausible insertions once
tape made it possible). Cortot’s expressive gestures here have no place on this sort of
scale in later or in much contemporary playing, then, and for a listener accustomed only
to later playing they will not make immediate sense. We see this again and again in
unsympathetic comments on early recorded performance. And this is the case precisely
because, just as within Cortot’s performance itself, the rules of expressivity can be
radically reset by performers, both over years on the very large scale, and over seconds
on the small. Over years, these kinds of gestures become normal and then increasingly
abnormal; over seconds they are formed in one configuration and then changed into
another: the principle is the same. Music works, as analysts know so well, on our
expectations, variously soothing them and upsetting them according to what composers
and performers need to do in order to communicate expressively with us.
¶48 With all these points in mind we can now see what Cortot imagined when he came
to represent the piece through metaphor. Here are his comments as noted down by
Jeanne Thieffry, probably sometime in the early 1930s, soon after this recording.

This piece must be played in the mood of a mourner, with the face dimly veiled and the
eyes heavy with tears. The beginning should be so quiet as to be hardly perceptible: it
should be a mere murmur. In the left hand the finger that establishes the change of
harmony should alone emerge a little from the pianissimo. In the right hand there should
be nothing but a lament, the lament of a mourner who can no longer lift up his voice.

At the twelfth bar pass from the feeling of sadness to sudden terror. Here it is no longer
a question of correctness, of strict time, but of superhuman sorrow. Emphasize the
chords of the left hand by thrusting the fingers well into the keyboard, and let the
clamour of the right hand reach a kind of frenzy. Then the lament dies away. There is a
pause—a long one—and then in the last chords a note of doom. The highest note alone
of these chords will be held for its full value. The others will be abandoned previously,
at the same time as the pedal. 56

¶49 You’ll see at once how like this is to Lehmann’s notes for students: the same
mixture of acting and technical instruction. The performer is told how to feel as well as
what to do, and for very good reasons. There is no more efficient way of
communicating to a student performer how to shape a piece in a particular way than to
tell her how to feel or what to imagine the music is evoking. It’s painfully
unfashionable, but none the less true, that representing music through metaphor is a
direct way of communicating precisely what one hears or wants to hear. It’s a far more
direct route than specifying note lengths and loudnesses, as comparing my text and
Cortot’s, as representations of his performance, makes abundantly clear. The ease with
which we map metaphor onto music, and vice versa, tells us something very important
about the way music works—not (or not only) as a system of abstract patterns giving us
mathematical pleasure but as a system of triggers in which patterns are mapped by the
brain from sound onto memories with related properties, and vice versa. There’ll be
more to say about this in chapter 8. For now the important point is that however
‘extreme’ or ‘fantastic’ or ‘indulgent’ or ‘romantic’ Cortot’s and Lehmann’s approaches
to performance and teaching may seem, they do make very good use of the way in
which our brains construct musical meaning. There is much more to this manner of
performance than just 1930s fashions in sentiment, and that is why, for anyone who has
become acclimatised to it, it can still be so powerful today, and why there is so much for
modern performers to learn from it.

Artur Rubinstein

¶50 We’ve seen how singing style changed quite suddenly after the Second World War,
and the same is true of piano playing. An interesting barometer is Artur Rubinstein, one
of those relatively unusual musicians whose style changed markedly during a long life.
Rubinstein was born in 1887 in Poland, but studied mainly in Berlin where he made his
debut in 1900 aged 13. His musical development was under the watchful eye of
Joachim, whose style of violin playing Rubinstein realised was relatively plain (‘ascetic
restraint and nobility’) only once he’d heard Ysaye, whose much more intense
expressivity had an immediate impact on him. 57 It was this newer style that Rubinstein
developed in himself, and to that extent he began very much as a child of his time. He
rethought his approach to practice and technique in 1934, 58 but while much has been
made of the resulting improvement in his playing (not least by himself), 59 it was in fact
much later that his way of being musical became modernised. When and how this
happened has yet to be investigated. But because Rubinstein recorded substantial parts
of his repertoire twice, once in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, we can hear that his
performance style did change substantially. While Cortot played in much the same way
throughout his recording career—compare his conception of Schumann’s ‘Der Dichter
spricht’ in its representations on disc in 1935 and on film in 1953 60 —Rubinstein fitted
much more easily into the general stylistic context of his time, even in his 70s and 80s.
His recordings of Chopin’s Mazurka, Op. 68 no. 3 illustrate this clearly. The first was
made in 1938 for HMV, 61 the last in 1966, 62 and even a casual hearing suggests that the
latter recording is rhythmically more regular, the three beats of each bar less widely
varied in length than in 1938. If we compare it to a selection of modern recordings we
can expect to hear that this trend towards regular 3/4 continued through the later 20th
century, as the performance practice for Chopin’s 3/4 music became increasingly
homogenised. Where once the different composed languages of the nocturne, Polonaise,
mazurka and valse were expressed through correspondingly different habits of rhythmic
emphasis, increasingly the three beats of the bar became more even, the composed
language less noticed by the performance style. 63 Figure 14 confirms this in a small
way, charting Rubinstein’s beat-lengths in 1938 (the most jagged line) against those of
his 1966 recording and those of four younger players all producing smoother lines. It’s
easy to see how Rubinstein in 1966 sits between the extremes, reflecting a significant
change in his style, matching changes in the playing of the first post-War generation.
That said, there are interesting exceptions among the younger players. Luisada is
considerably freer than the others. And like Luisada, Indjic, though playing evenly in
the A-section material, in the middle section, based around an ostinato fifth, is much
more free. From this we might propose that modern players, faced with a crotchet
ostinato in Chopin, are more likely to switch on rubato than early recorded pianists,
though much less likely to use it in more varied textures. More examples need to be
analysed to test this, of course. 64

Figure 14: Artur Rubinstein, Chopin, Mazurka Op. 63 no. 3, in 1938 (dark blue)
and 1966 (pink) compared to four younger pianists

¶51 A more sophisticated analysis of the data, by Craig Sapp, using hierarchical
correlation plots, 65 compares the curves of these graphs with one another to represent
visually how alike they are. The bottoms of the triangles represent similarities between
pairs of performances at the level of the beat; as one moves up, larger and larger groups
of beats are compared until at the top one sees only the complete piece; so the more
uniform the colour patterns further down the triangle the more alike are the
performances. (Plate 8) This shows particularly clearly, in a way that one can read from
the tempo graphs but is less immediately apparent there, the similarities between
Rubinstein’s recordings, for which the colour patterns are very alike. Although an
important respect in which they belong to different generations is by showing different
attitudes to rubato, the 1966 performance is in some ways an evened-out, more regular
version of the 1938 one. The only other performance like it is Chiu’s, leading to the
possibility that Chiu had Rubinstein 1966 in mind as a model. Similarly, there are a few
but quite striking similarities between Rubinstein 1938 and Luisada, though these are
certainly clearer from a straight comparison of the tempo graphs (and, of course, from
listening) than from the correlation plots. And there are structural but not surface (and
so not stylistic) features in common between Luisada and Indjic.

Plate 8: Chopin, Mazurka Op. 68 no. 3, correlation plots (by Craig Sapp).
Explanation and further examples are at http://mazurka.org.uk/ana/timescape/

¶52 Figure 15 charts data for a selection of performances of the first 16-bar phrase of
Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9 no. 2, from Josef Hofmann in 1911, through
Rubinstein in 1936, to Maria Pires in 1996. 66 The contours of the graphs tell the story
plainly. The three recorded after the Second War are noticeably less jagged than the
four before, except that Leopold Godowski plays with a regularity that, while
uncharacteristic of his time, is a very noticeable feature of his personal style in all his
recordings. In general, though, the beats are less varied in length (there is less rubato)
from the 1960s and 90s than in the 10s, 20s and 30s. Of course these are not the only
features of piano playing that changed. There is less anticipation of the melody by the
bass in the second half of the century—although Kathryn Stott is a fascinating exception
here, again a feature of personal style out of keeping with the norm around about. 67

Figure 15: Rubato in Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 9 no. 2, bb. 1-16, from
Hofmann (1911) to Pires (1996)

¶53 How variation in colour and in dynamics are handled is harder to say from early
recordings, and therefore generalisations about change in those dimensions over the
course of the century are more difficult to make: much closer study will be required
before we can put all these elements of piano playing together into a more accurate
story. But it does seem reasonable to suggest that details at the note-to-note level varied
across a much broader scale early in the 20th century than later on. As players after the
War were less inclined to allow large contrasts from note to note, so their attention
shifted to higher levels, delineating formal structure expressively rather than
microstructure. This had a variety of consequences—and this is true for all kinds of
music-making, not just for piano playing.

¶54 In moving their focus of attention from the detail to the whole, from the surface of
the composition to its underlying structure, from descriptive to analytical playing,
performers responded to much broader changes of focus in society. We’ve seen a
related phenomenon in post-War singing and its search for deeper meaning. The
baroque-instrument and Urtext movements reflected similar shifts in attitude, as did the
contemporaneous growth of musical analysis. 68 In many ways music-making after the
second War was a more serious, now ethically-based activity. While the previous focus
on the musical surface, on the shaping of tunes and local gestures, enhanced classical
music’s entertainment value, allowing audiences to follow its shifting moods from
moment to moment, continually moved by something new, the more austere analytical
view of post-War performance (and commentary, of course) increasingly downplayed
music’s entertainment value and insisted instead on its music-structural integrity: it was
(as Hanslick had insisted long before) to be a language of its own, not representative of
anything else. This is, of course, exactly the attitude underlying the post-War avant-
garde, another manifestation of the same widespread change in attitudes on the part of
music professionals. Composers ceased to be entertainers and became experimenters,
scientists even. 69 One could argue that recording made this possible, or at least
alleviated the worst economic effects by allowing music to be heard repeatedly and
conveniently, compensating for the greater difficulty of making sense of it at first
hearing, and also by turning performers who might, for the older generation at least,
seem austere into (musical) household names. It seems possible that without the LP and
the consequent reinvigoration of the recorded music market, the less approachable style
of post-War players would have had considerable economic disadvantages. 70 But
recording is not in itself sufficient explanation for the continuing popularity of classical
music performance through the 50s, 60s and 70s. Listeners surely became better at
hearing details, so that as performers worked with much smaller changes from note to
note listeners adapted with them. How else can one explain the deep and universal
admiration for players who worked with a relatively subtle palette of expressive
gestures like Curzon, Brendel, or Perahia?

¶55 Not everything was treated austerely, either. The complexity of post-War
performance practices is evident when one adds to this melting-pot of possible causes
and effects those pieces (mostly Chopin) which continued to be performed with wide
rubato through the whole of the 20th century. The Prelude, Op. 28 no. 4, whose 1942
performance by Cortot we examined earlier, is a case in point; the Berceuse another.
Looking across a century’s performances of the e minor Prelude it’s actually those of
the 1940s (Cortot excepted—his as we’ve seen was fixed already by 1926) that seem
the plainest, Rubinstein’s of 1946 especially so. 71 More recently pianists have struggled
to bring back intense expressivity to it, not always very convincingly since this kind of
rubato-led expressivity no longer comes naturally. Pogorelich’s 1990 recording seems
to this listener particularly awkward, with notes stretched in different places from bar to
bar, not always with any very obvious connection to the voice-leading, as if the
stretching itself were a guarantee of expressivity, regardless of how it’s done. 72 And to
an extent it probably is: for reasons that will become clearer in chapter 8 our brains
probably do interpret rubato as expressive in itself; but of course it’s much more so
when it happens in places where expressivity makes sense to us for other reasons too. 73

¶56 A more interesting example, because it is still so often done so well, is Chopin’s
Berceuse. Here the repetition throughout the piece of a left-hand ostinato (tonic-
dominant seventh until almost the end) allows no other harmonic guide for the use of
rubato. If expressivity is to be signalled through rubato then it’s going to have to be led
by the melodic content of the right hand. Several of the early recorded pianists—Moriz
Rosenthal (b. 1862, rec. 1930), Josef Hofmann (b. 1876, rec. 1918), Ignacy Friedman
(b. 1882, rec. 1928)—play it relatively straight, and very fast (Hofmann takes three
minutes, Friedman 3’20” and Rosenthal a little over 4’, as opposed to almost 6’ for
Maria-João Pires in 1998). 74 Paderewski (b. 1860, rec. 1922) uses more rubato, but pays
most expressive attention to differentiating the characters of the right-hand sections
using rubato and variation in tone. Friedman modifies the left-hand quite extensively
(presumably to make it more interesting). Cortot is typically free with rubato, producing
a kaleidoscopically nuanced performance that responds to every twist and turn in the
right-hand line. Backhaus (b. 1884, rec. 1927) takes a similar but more restrained
approach, using accelerando and ritardando over longer stretches rather than moment-
driven rubato. But all these pre-War performances belong to a similar stylistic world in
which rubato is placed so as to point up details of voice-leading that seem to have
expressive potential.

¶57 Jumping to the 1960s and to Perlemuter (b. 1904, rec.1960) we find hardly less
rubato, indeed possibly more than Hofmann or Friedman, with Perlemuter almost
Cortot-like in his stretching and contracting of beat-lengths. But there’s an important
difference: Perlemuter uses this rubato to shape whole phrases rather than momentary
gestures. And that tends to be the way it is used by most players in the second half of
the century. This is an important change, reflecting a more structural, less rhetorical
approach to shaping music in performance. Another is the much greater length of most
post-War performances of the Berceuse. If anything, one might expect these two
factors—rubato and length—to encourage each other, greater rubato making longer
performances, and indeed that is what happens in Cortot’s, which is the longest of the
pre-War recordings, but in general that is not the case. Nor is it a matter of phrase-end
rubato taking longer (or involving less compensation) than gesture-led. The post-War
performances are just much slower, which fits with general trends in performances of all
sorts. 75

¶58 We’ll look at a more typical example of post-War pianism in chapter 8 (Schnabel
playing Schumann), in discussing the expression of structure, pursued as a common
goal by most pianists from the late 1940s. Where the Berceuse is different is in its
continuing to attract wide rubato throughout the rest of the century. As I’ve suggested,
this is tied up with the nature of the ostinato which would bring death to any
performance without flexibility at some other level. But what is most striking about the
rubato in the latest 20th-century recordings is, just as in the e minor Prelude, its
waywardness. It’s as if performers no longer knew how to manage it. Both Vásáry (b.
1933, rec. 1967) and Ashkenazy (b. 1937, rec. 1976) produce wonderfully meditative
performances, in tune, one might say, with their times, but both grind almost to a halt on
the final page. Theirs are much less lively performances than those on the earlier
recordings, requiring more concentration from an audience. Howard Shelley (b. 1950,
rec. 1991) turns attention towards the left hand, shaping it in two-unit (four-bar)
phrases, and allowing it to play a role in shaping the performance while the right hand
becomes more decorative. Again, this is a structural approach to performing that pays
less attention to the musical surface (a slightly curious decision in this piece, perhaps),
and is in that sense modern. Maria-João Pires (b. 1944, rec. 1998) plays the piece
extremely slowly, with big dynamic surges to generate expressive phrasing so that much
more work is done by dynamics, and less by rubato, than in the earlier recordings. This,
too, is a modern tendency, switching attention from timing towards loudness as a
dominant agent of expressivity. Demidenko (b. 1955, rec.1992) makes good use of an
accelerating and then decelerating ostinato, which breathes well, but gets sidetracked
towards the end by an interest in bringing out inner voices. Nakamatsu (b. 1968, rec.
1998) plays the simpler passages straight, but uses rubato (well) in the more
complicated phrases, so that the beginning and end of the piece seem to belong to a
different expressive world from the more complex middle. Kissin (b. 1971, rec. 1998)
uses half-pedalling throughout, aiming perhaps to produce by blurring the sound the
dreamy impression once made more subtly by other means, and his rubato is wayward.
All of these are wonderful pianists, albeit in very different ways, yet they seem to have
little shared sense of how a piece like this can be made to work. The means to it are
simply not part of current piano technique, so that each pianist has to invent a solution
for themselves as best they can. While it can be very hard, close up, to see how style is
developing around one, the Berceuse does offer a particularly revealing measure of the
way in which available technique has changed.

¶59 It must be evident from this brief discussion of post-War piano playing that there is
everything still to do if we want to sort out how playing developed through periods that
are still relatively close to us. It takes a lot of perspective to see the general features of a
period’s performance style and to understand how they relate to their cultural context,
and in the end only a lot of time is going to give us that. But we could make a good start
by assembling detailed studies of a range of performers and repertories, and I hope that
readers may want to contribute to that. There is a huge amount of fascinating research
waiting to be done.

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Footnotes

1.
Michael Musgrave, ‘Early trends in the performance of Brahms’s piano music’,
in ed. Michael Musgrave & Bernard Sherman, Performing Brahms: early
evidence of performance style (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 302-8 and
accompanying CD. Back to context...
2.
See Philip (2002) on this error. Back to context...
3.
http://www.lib.umd.edu/PAL/IPAM/traditions.html Back to context...
4.
For a much more carefully considered discussion of schools see Philip (2002),
Chapter 6, 183-203. Back to context...
5.
For a domestic eye-witness account of Wieck see Amy Fay, Music-Study in
Germany from the home correspondence of Amy Fay (New York: Macmillan,
1896; repr. N.p.: Elibron, 2002), 164-8. For a recent study see Cathleen
Köckritz, Friedrich Wieck: Studien zur Biographie und zur Klavierpädagogik
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2007). Back to context...
6.
Shaw (1981) I, 97. Back to context...
7.
Nancy B Reich, Clara Schumann: the artist and the woman (Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 1985), 294. Back to context...
8.
Eugenie Schumann, Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann, trans. Marie Busch
(London: Heinemann, 1927), 195-6. Back to context...
9.
 Fay (1896), 300. On Clara Schumann see esp. 25-7, and also the perhaps
contradictory 37 & 274, written almost four years apart. Back to context...
10.
Shaw (1981) I, 639. Back to context...
11.
Reissued on ‘The Piano G & Ts Volume 2’, Appian APR 5532 (issued 1997),
tracks 24-7 (the Mendelssohn track 25). Pugno’s Mendelssohn is track 16. Back
to context...
12.
Shaw (1981) II, 644. Back to context...
13.
Papers of Fanny Davies are kept at the Royal College of Music (London), call-
mark GB 1249 7499-7511, and include notes on and correspondence from Clara
Schumann. Back to context...
14.
Matrix (W)AX 5364 (rec. 10 December 1930), issued on US Columbia, 67799-
D. My thanks to Roger Beardsley for locating and transferring the discs. Back to
context...
15.
Fay (1896), 27. Back to context...
16.
‘She played the first eight bars [of a Czerny exercise] from the wrist with all the
notes of equal strength, forte, yet exquisitely mellow in tone, never stiffening the
wrist for an instant, and knitting the chords rhythmically together so that the
simple piece suddenly took on life and character.’ Schumann (1927), 97. Back to
context...
17.
Schumann (1927), 193. Back to context...
18.
A spectrogram analysis of early bass in the playing of Myra Hess is included in
Leech-Wilkinson (2001). Back to context...
19.
Matrix (W)AX 5363 (rec. 10 December 1930), issued on US Columbia, 67799-
D. Back to context...
20.
PRAAT was used to mark up the spectrogram with beats. The beat timings were
extracted into Excel which was used to calculate the inter-onset intervals. The
same could now be done more easily in Sonic Visualiser. There are several other
interesting details to be found in Figure 11 as well as those mentioned here. Note
that the data shown in Figure 11 comes not from Sound File 21 (wav file) but
from the commercial transfer published as ‘Pupils of Clara Schumann’, Pearl
GEMM CDS 9904-9, disc 1, track 2, 19’ 28” – 21’ 08”, and the differences
could also be the subject of fruitful study. Back to context...
21.
A long list of circumstances in which asynchronous playing may be used is to be
found in the first systematic study of the phenomenon (though with data derived
from piano rolls): Leroy Ninde Vernon, ‘Synchronization of chords in artistic
piano music’, in ed. Seashore (1936), 306-45 at 322. Back to context...
22.
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/projects/p2_1.html Back to context...
23.
Reich (1985), 295. Back to context...
24.
I have not attempted to discuss the notion of ‘compensating rubato’. A great deal
has been written about it, but there is little chance of understanding where it did
and didn’t occur without a statistically valid sampling of recorded performances,
in other words, a very large study indeed. I look forward to reading it one day. In
the meantime, although she uses only evidence from Debussy, see Sarah Martin,
‘The case of compensating rubato’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
127 (2002) 95-129, which valuably surveys the literature and finds that Debussy
did practice it with considerable subtlety. Back to context...
25.
Jerrold Northrop Moore in ‘Pupils of Clara Schumann’, Pearl GEMM CDS
9904-9 (issued 1986), booklet pp. 27-31. Back to context...
26.
‘Pupils of Clara Schumann’, disc 6, track 9. Back to context...
27.
‘Johannes Brahms: Fantasien Op. 116, Intermezzi Op. 117, Klavierstücke Op.
118 & Op. 119’, Wilhelm Kempff, DG 437 249-2 (original issue 1964; no
reissue date), track 18. I explain how to produce these tempo graphs in chapter
8. See alternatively http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/analysing/p9_0_1.html. Back to
context...
28.
Ronald Woodley reports (in a seminar at the Institute of Musical Research,
London, 9 November 2006) that another recording, undated but about 15 years
earlier than the 1962 tapes, kept by her family in Canada, is also very similar.
Back to context...
29.
Schumann (1927), 171. Compare Michael Musgrave’s reading of Brahms’s
surviving recorded performance Musgrave (2003). Back to context...
30.
Cortot (1951), 28. Back to context...
31.
Pugno recordings from 1903 are reissued on ‘The Piano G & Ts Volume 2’,
Appian APR 5532 (issued 1997), tracks 11-23. An invaluable ‘buyers’ guide’ to
CD reissues of early piano recordings is available from the International Piano
Archives at Maryland. Back to context...
32.
Michalowski recordings from 1905 and 1912 are reissued on ‘The Piano G & Ts
Volume 1’, Appian APR 5531 (issued 1995), tracks 14-25. Back to context...
33.
Pachmann reissues include ‘The Piano G & Ts Volume 1’, tracks 1-13 (1907 &
1909), ‘Vladimir de Pachmann: complete recordings volume 2’, Dante HPC061
(issued 1996), and volume 3, HPC065 (issued 1997). According to some reports
Pachmann also studied in Florence with Chopin's last assistant, but Nigel
Nettheim informs me that this is a myth. Back to context...
34.
On ‘a la Chopin’, meaning more than it did to Pachmann, see Barolsky (2005),
142-54. Back to context...
35.
 My source was the ‘EMI Centenary Edition’, disc 3 (7243 5 66185 2), track 9
(issued 1997, from HMV DA 761, rec. 1926). Back to context...
36.
For a biography and numerous anecdotes see Mark Mitchell, Vladimir de
Pachmann (Indiana University Press, 2002). Back to context...
37.
See also Leech-Wilkinson (2001), 8-10, using ‘Great Pianists of the 20th
Century’, vol. 30 (Philips, 456 784-2), disc 1, track 12. There is a transfer by
Ward Marston on ‘Ignaz Friedman: complete recordings, volume 3’, Naxos
8.110690 (issued 2003), track 11. Back to context...
38.
‘The Piano G & Ts Volume 2’, Appian APR 5532 (issued 1997), tracks 1-10
(Op 33 no 4 is track 3). Back to context...
39.
Aeolia 2002, disc 1, track 2, playing a roll published in November 1922. Back to
context...
40.
Matrix 2EA 8892-1, issued on HMV C 3197, rec. 31 October 1940. Back to
context...
41.
Readers already familiar with Sonic Visualiser session files may wish to
download Data File 1 (sv file), which we’ll use again in chapter 8. Back to
context...
42.
Fink (1999), Taruskin (1995). Back to context...
43.
www.lib.umd.edu/PAL/IPAM/cortot.html Back to context...
44.
Jeanne Thieffry, Alfred Cortot’s Studies in Musical Interpretation, trans. Robert
Jacques (London: Harrap, 1937; original French edition Paris 1934), 48. Back to
context...
45.
For discussion of Cortot’s addition of a linking cadenza between two of
Schubert’s Ländler, see Barolsky (2005), 167-81. Back to context...
46.
Alfred Cortot, Édition de travail des oeuvres de Chopin: Ballads (Paris,
Salabert?, 1929), 24, 48. On Cortot’s edition and recordings of the last
movement of the second Piano Sonata, Op. 35, see the excellent discussion in
Barolsky (2005), 240-50. Back to context...
47.
Cortot does this in all four recordings, though less prominently in the 1933
(matrix 2B5218-1, issued on HMV DB 2017, there only bb. 72-5). Back to
context...
48.
Matrix Cc8169-2, rec. 1926, issued on HMV DB 959 (listen for bb. 71-5). Back
to context...
49.
Matrix Cc8161-3, rec. 1926, issued on HMV DB 960. Back to context...
50.
Cortot (1951), 52. Back to context...
51.
An interesting study could be made of the differences between Cortot’s recorded
performances of the Preludes, which are remarkably small considering the 29-
year time-span from first to last. They are to be found in HMV DB 957/60
(1926), HMV DB 2015/18 (1933), HMV W 1541/4 (1942), all available in the
French EMI set CZS 7 67359 2, and a live recording from Munich (1955)
reissued on Urania SP 4251, plus the sides from the unpublished 1927 and 1928
sets found at King’s and available from the CHARM website (
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/sound/sound_cortot.html) and the alternative takes
from the 1928 sessions found by Ward Marston and now at the International
Piano Archives Maryland. The 1926 recording, to which the 1928 version is
closest, is also available on Naxos 8.111023. There is a useful Cortot
discography by Youngrok Lee at
http://fischer.hosting.paran.com/music/music.htm. Back to context...
52.
Matrix CR2046-2, 0’1.5” – 1’50”, rec. 4 June 1928, issued on at least one copy
of HMV DB 957 in place of the 1926 matrix Cc8157-3. Back to context...
53.
As well as Eric Clarke, ‘Expression in performance: generativity, perception and
semiosis’, in ed. Rink 1995, 21-54, other empirical studies of performances of
Op. 28 no. 4 include John A. Sloboda, Andreas C. Lehmann & Richard Parncutt,
‘Perceiving intended emotion in concert-standard performances of Chopin's
prelude no. 4 in E minor’, in ed. Alf Gabrielsson, Proceedings of the Third
Triennial ESCOM Conference. Uppsala, Sweden, (European Society for the
Cognitive Sciences of Music, 1997), 629-34; Eric Clarke & Jane Davidson, ‘The
Body in Performance’, in Composition-Performance-Reception: Studies in the
Creative Process in Music, ed. Wyndham Thomas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998),
74-92; John A. Sloboda & Andreas C. Lehmann, ‘Tracking performance
correlates of changes in perceived intensity of emotions during different
interpretations of a Chopin piano Prelude’, Music Perception 19 (2001), 87-120;
Rita Aiello, ‘Playing the Piano by Heart. From Behavior to Cognition’, Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences 930 (2001), 389-93; Naomi Ziv and Ohad
Moran, ‘Human versus computer: the effect of a statement concerning a musical
performance’s source on the evaluation of its quality and expressivity’,
Empirical Studies of the Arts 24 (2006), 177-91. For analytical discussion of
several early recorded performances see John Rink, ‘The line of argument in
Chopin’s E minor Prelude’, Early Music 29 (2001), 435-44, and his later
discussion, with its very interesting example, in ‘The state of play in
performance studies’, in ed. Jane W Davidson, The Music Practitioner: research
for the music performer, teacher and listener (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 37-51.
Most recently, in counterpoint to Rink (2001), Daniel Barolsky has studied
Moiseiwitsch's 1948 recording in ‘Embracing imperfection in Benno
Moiseiwitsch's prelude to Chopin’, Music Performance Research 2 (2008), 48-
60. Back to context...
54.
In Figure 13 the numbers beneath the staff indicate the timing difference
between melody and accompaniment, the left-hand chord always sounding
before the right-hand melody. The numbers in the middle are the lengths of each
quaver beat, defined by the melody when it sounds, otherwise the
accompaniment. The numbers above the staff are loudnesses of the whole
 texture at the moment at which each melody note sounds, or in the absence of a
melody note, each accompaniment chord. The measurements were made in
Sonic Visualiser using the setup in Data File 2 (sv file), with the loudnesses read
off by hand at the loudest point following each attack (Sapp’s settings for 'Power
Curve: Smoothed Power' shift the loudest point to the right). It should be borne
in mind that perceived loudness is not always consistent with measured
loudness. As ever, figures like these are too much subject to software, hardware
and operator quirks to bear the entire weight of any research hypothesis. Back to
context...
55.
Here I mean ‘dynamic’ in the general not the musical sense, and I’ve tried to be
careful to reserve the word for this more general sense throughout the book.
Back to context...
56.
Jeanne Thieffry, Alfred Cortot’s Studies in Musical Interpretation, transl. Robert
Jacques (London: Harrap, 1937), 45-6. For another fine example see the film of
Cortot’s masterclass from 1953 in which he plays, with running programmatic
commentary, ‘Der Dichter spricht’ from Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Christian
Labrande and Donald Sturrock, The Art of Piano: Great pianists of the 20 th
century (NVC Arts, videotape 3984-29199-3, DVD 3984 29199 2, 1999). Back
to context...
57.
Artur Rubinstein, My Young Years (London: Cape, 1973), 32 and passim. Back
to context...
58.
Harvey Sachs, Arthur Rubinstein: a life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
1996 (New York edition 1995)), 251-2. Back to context...
59.
Arthur Rubinstein, My Many Years (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987 (1st ed.
1980)), 353-4. Back to context...
60.
Disc: HMV DB 2582, mat. 2EA 2142, reissued on ‘Alfred Cortot plays
Schumann’, Biddulph LHW 005 (issued 1991), track 13. Film: Labrande &
Sturrock (1999). Back to context...
61.
HMV DB 3808, mat. 2EA7239-1 (rec. 13 Dec 1938); reissued on ‘Great
Pianists. Rubinstein. Fryderyk Chopin: Mazurkas’, Naxos 8.110657, track 19.
An intervening recording appeared on HMV ALP 1400 (rec. 16 Jul 1952). Back
to context...
62.
RCA Victor RB 6704 (rec. 3 Jan 66), reissued on ‘Great Pianists: Artur
Rubinstein I’, Philips 456 955-2, disc 2, track 10. Back to context...
63.
Probably unrelated, but very interesting, is that finding of Bengtsson and
Gabrielsson (1983) that musically expert listeners to Viennese waltzes liked
more radical deviations from the notated beat-lengths than non-expert listeners.
Ingmar Bengtsson & Alf Gabrielsson, ‘Analysis and synthesis of musical
rhythm’ in ed. Johan Sundberg, Studies of Musical Performance (Stockholm:
Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 1983), 27-60. Back to context...
64.
 The data for this comparison is taken from the Centre for the History and
Analysis of Recorded Music’s Mazurka project: see http://www.mazurka.org.uk.
The beat-lengths are harvested by tapping to the recording, making adjustments
in a spectrum visualisation program (in this case Sonic Visualiser, which
became available while this chapter was being written), and automatically
recording the results, then importing them into the Excel spreadsheet to produce
the graph. I am most grateful to Craig Sapp for collecting this data, which can be
found in full at http://www.mazurka.org.uk/info/revcond/. Back to context...
65.
For a detailed explanation see http://mazurka.org.uk/ana/timescape/. For a first
example of such data used in a broader argument see Cook (2007). Back to
context...
66.
Josef Hofmann, matrix 30740 (rec. 4 Apr 1911), issued on Columbia L 1089.
Mark Hambourg, matrix Cc11384 (rec. 15 Sep 1927), issued on HMV C 1416.
Leopold Godowski, mat. WAX3808 (rec. 1 June 1928 ), issued on Columbia L
2164. Arthur Rubinstein, mat. 2EA4436 (rec. 30 Oct 1936) issued on HMV DB
3186. Adam Harasiewicz (rec. June 1961), Philips 422-2802. Kathryn Stott (rec.
December 1992), Unicorn Kanchana DKPCD 9147/8. Maria-João Pires (rec. Jan
& May 1996), DG 447 096-2. Back to context...
67.
The distinction between personal and period style is discussed in Chapter 7
below. Back to context...
68.
See also Leech-Wilkinson (2006). Back to context...
69.
See M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: compositional theory in post-
war Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Back to context...
70.
For a variety of proposals about ways in which recording changed music-making
see Chanan (1995) and Katz (2004). Back to context...
71.
CD reissue: ‘Rubinstein Collection, vol. 16’, BMG 09026 63016-2 (issued
2000). Back to context...
72.
DG 429 227-2, track 4. But readers may hear it quite differently, of course. Back
to context...
73.
For another curious but interesting example see Mitsuko Uchida’s recording of
Schubert’s Moment musical no. 5, Philips 470 164-2 (issued 2002), also on
Gramophone GCD0902 Sept 2002, track 5. Note that magazine cover discs are
extremely valuable barometers of period style: a growing collection will become
a fine source for anyone interested in how performance changes. Back to
context...
74.
For an acute analysis of Hofmann’s playing of Beethoven see Barolsky (2005),
74-120, and on his Chopin playing, 126-9, 159-60. Back to context...
75.
Bowen (1999). Back to context...
©2009 King's College London, Strand, Lon
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

7. Style change: causes and effects

¶1 It’s clear that performance style has changed hugely, and also that the mechanisms
underlying style change must be hugely complex. We can achieve some clarification if
we try to work out what elements make it up. 1 One approach would be to think about
what performers do. A very rough map is set out in Figure 16.

Figure 16: Some determinants of performance style

¶2 According to this model, a performer’s style is defined by an interaction of the

properties of their instrument (potential sound and the ways it can be produced), what
they can physically do, and what they choose to do. The sound of the instrument,
however, results also from an interaction of potential plus period preferences for sound
production. What performers can physically do, is a mix of the mechanics of their body
plus practice, the way they have taught their body to make music; and practice is shaped
by period and personal taste (especially by current ideas about what kinds of sounds and
sequences of sounds are musical and appropriate), encouraging the development of
certain habitual physical movements, for example particular kinds of phrasing and the
fingering, bowing or breathing that produce those movements. 2 What performers do by
conscious choice is an interaction between their physical ability (as just defined), period
taste and personal taste.

¶3 What you can see from that set of definitions is that period taste comes in at almost
every point. It’s there because we know from recordings that performance style
changes. Why it should change does not seem on the face of it a difficult question for a
society that prizes individuality and variety to any extent. How it changes is much more
interesting. It seems hard to imagine—and once we’ve seen how much musical
expression draws on other kinds of expressivity it will seem inconceivable—that
musical practice is self-contained, changing independently of changes in taste in the
world around it. So one area for future investigation has to be the relationship between
performance style and other kinds of styles, especially styles of communication,
including staged communication.

¶4 Making a very modest start, comparing performance style only to styles of writing
about music, I looked in chapter 4 at the case of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as a singer of
Schubert, arguing that his approach to the character of the music led to writers seeing
Schubert songs from a new, less innocent perspective. And in an earlier article I added
to some of those points the case of Pierre Boulez, whose conducting career brought with
it exposure he’d avoided as a composer both to problems of musical continuity and to
wider performance traditions. This in turn led him to rethink his compositional style.
And I showed how in response to later, more melodious performances writers on
modernist music came to hear it in a quite different way: where once they had heard
points, now they heard lines. 3 In both these cases the influence seemed to come from
the performance to the writings, 4 and in both the change of view was profound, so
radical in fact that the music appeared in retrospect to have been thoroughly
misunderstood a generation before, even by those who composed it. As I proposed in
chapter 2, as performances changed, the music they made—our view of the
compositions, in fact our conceptions of these ‘works’—changed. This gives us some
clues, I think, to the extent of change that we can expect in the understanding of many
kinds of music, at any rate across the last one hundred years (probably, given the huge
and rapid changes in composition style, across centuries before).

¶5 The changes I’ve mentioned so far were all intra-musical, but performance style can
change in response to extra-musical changes in outlook as well. In an article on
portamento, mentioned above in passing, I drew on the possible relationship outlined in
chapter 4 between Fischer-Dieskau’s Schubert interpretation and the effect on people’s
attitudes to artistic expression brought about by the horrors of the Second World War. 5
We’ve already seen how styles in all genres we’ve examined changed after that war,
and the discussion of Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau gives some idea of why that
might have happened. In the article I look at how that brought a more or less immediate
end to an expressive technique that had been declining only quite gradually up until
1939. Where portamento had for a long time been charming, helping to signal
uncomplicated feelings of security and love (though its association with ‘motherese’), it
now seemed undeservedly self-indulgent, pathetically naive in the face of so much
evidence that people could delight in the Austro-German musical classics, and the
performing styles that before the war had seemed to belong to them, without being
fundamentally well-intentioned towards fellow human beings. All that portamento,
which had seemed to signal empathy, a willingness to be moved by the feelings being
portrayed in music, was a sham. After the War it became an embarrassment.

¶6 Here, then, is one instance—but I hope a powerful one—of the dependence of

musical performance style upon much wider changes in outlook. But note where the
interrelationship is made. It comes very specifically in the modelling of emotional
expressivity. As music is similar to other kinds of human communication, through its
ability to sound like anger or love or calm or agitation and so on, so it is capable of
being influenced by changes in the way in which those states of mind are expressed in
the wider world. Let’s take an imaginary example. In a society in which triumph was
felt to be tainted and its public expression inappropriate, for example after militaristic
triumphalism had led to nuclear holocaust, grandiosity could play little part in current
performance style. Because music can model grandiosity quite easily this would have
consequences for playing and singing: much Beethoven and Berlioz, Wagner and Verdi
would sound quite different. By contrast if society were to take violent exception for a
while to television it would have no stylistic impact on music-making whatsoever:
music can’t model television, because although TV transmits styles of human
communication it does not generate them: it’s a thing, indexing a technology but not a
person in the way that, as Watt & Ash have shown, music indexes the movements and
emotional experiences of humans to the extent that it is perceived as behaving as if it
were a person. 6 Portamento is a much more complex phenomenon than either of these
examples, and consequently the factors that led to its rejection will be much more
complex than I have suggested. But the interrelationship with wider culture is clearly
operational.

¶7 We can reasonably conclude, therefore, that performance styles change not just
internally, for reasons that make sense only to practising musicians, but in a relationship
(sometimes more causal, perhaps, sometimes more responsive) with other complex
patterns of change in expressive communication. A good place to look, then, for parallel
changes ought to be theatre and film. Because both those reflect very directly current
modes of communication between humans in a particular cultural context we ought, all
other things being equal, to be able to see similarities between actorly and musical
performing styles. Of course, all other things are not equal and it’s not as easy as it
sounds. So tempting as it might be to see links between the extreme visual expressivity
of faces in silent cinema and musical performance styles of the 1910s and 20s (rubato,
portamento etc), the fact that film was silent obviously caused extreme exaggeration in
facial expressivity. One could argue, perhaps, that the exaggeration shows all the more
clearly the sorts of emotional responses people had at the time, but unless one could
show that music was also an exaggerated form of emotional representation (which
might be interesting, since it could be so) it would be hard to correlate the two
convincingly. A better parallel might be between, say, the intense expressivity of acting
style seen in the great Hollywood blockbusters of the 1930s, for example ‘Gone with
the Wind’ (1939), and the performances of the most actorly singers of the period, such
as Lotte Lehmann, or between performance styles in, say, Ingmar Bergman and Fischer-
Dieskau. At any rate, music in performance is in this way much more like theatre or
film than perhaps we have wanted it to be. Actors use the physical signs of emotional
states in their performances, and we are moved by watching and listening to them. 7
Exactly how that works is a much more complicated issue, one that has been very little
studied by film theorists so far. 8 Indeed, music cognition is far more advanced at the
moment than film cognition. It seems reasonable to see their problems as alike but it is
too early to know on what level these relationships can be most profitably explored. The
subject has not yet been researched, but it would be surprising if relationships were not
there to be found, given that both art forms are concerned above all else with
communicating information about emotional states as they change over time.

¶8 Coming back to musical performance per se, another approach to trying to analyse
style change would be to think about what performers do to scores. If one were to think
again in terms of a hierarchical diagram like Figure 16 the universals would remain
Time, Frequency and Amplitude, but immediately beneath them would come those
aspects of music-making that are likely always to have been determined by naturally
selected responses to sound. This is a topic that we’ll discuss in more depth in the next
chapter, but it should not be too controversial at this stage to include among them
imitations of sounds in the environment (rain, thunder, wind), of internal (pulse,
breathing) and external bodily movements (running, walking, jumping, caressing), and
of pre-linguistic communication through sound (shouts, murmurs, pitch glides and so
on). Through these responses one could explain associations such as ‘faster and/or
louder playing suggests more excitement, slower and/or quieter suggests more calm’
and so on. At this level, in other words, choices of style (whether composition or
performance style) refer to universal physical/emotional states: one would expect to find
these processes at work in the music-making of many cultures at most times, to the
extent that their music was designed to influence states of mind. They give us, for
example, most of the elements we need to conceive and perform motoric dance music.

¶9 But if we want to get into the model those features of western performance style that
we hear changing over recorded performance history then we need to start to sift
through a great many habits that are hard to disentangle. Relatively constant, one might
suppose, is a tendency to slow down at the ends of phrases or to articulate them by
altering the sounding lengths of notes. We can’t know how far this goes back in time.
Although it’s documented already in early plainchant notation it’s not present in all
world musics (nor in much western popular music). Clearly music can manage very
well without it, but equally clearly it is so natural that, as I mentioned when discussing
Kreisler’s playing, in experiments listeners are often not aware that it’s happening. 9 Is
this an extended period feature or a universal therefore?

¶10 The difficulty of knowing how to place such practices in a nature—culture

hierarchy arises because such features, although their use varies over time, nevertheless
draw on innate responses to sound. They are not simply codes chosen for social reasons.
In semiological terms they are not symbolic but rather iconic, they resemble the thing
they describe (in this case slowing down in order to finish an activity). Similarly
vibrato, which one might think should go quite late on into a tree-diagram of
performance style, being a feature that one gets at some times and not others, in fact
may be iconic, for example of a trembling voice and might thus index vulnerability
(among other things, and apart from its acoustical benefits for projection); 10 tempo
flexibility may be iconic of fluctuating emotional intensity and may thus index
emotional involvement; portamento, as I’ve suggested, 11 may be iconic of motherese
and so may index love and security. 12 And so on. How do we arrange these
hierarchically, and considering how deep they go into our physical and psychological
makeup would it make sense to try?

¶11 A better way of conceiving these constituents of performance style might be to

imagine them laid out over a field of possibilities, some of which is visible to people at
a particular time and some of which is not, the limits of visibility being set by general
period beliefs and tastes. The elements interact in very complex ways because of the
huge number of possible combinations. What we’re really talking about here are the
‘period taste’ elements of Figure 16, but as we can see they are in fact very much more
than just period specific. What is characteristic of particular places and times is
particular choices and combinations of elements (habits of timing, dynamics and pitch
adjustment); it’s these combinations and interactions that change over time on a broad
scale (period style) and from person to person on a smaller scale (personal style), from
performance to performance on a still smaller scale, and from moment to moment at the
musical surface. In principle, therefore, the same process operates on all time-scales:
what we do in varying timing from moment to moment in performance is in principle
not different from what happens to habits of rubato, for example, over centuries. All
options are theoretically available at every level, though in practice most are masked by
social constraints. From second to second physical changes in sound may be quite large
or quite small in absolute terms, depending on the current style (lots of rubato, for
example, or almost none), but the habits change little. Over larger spans of time
(decades) they change a lot more, and quite new ways of listening have to have been
developed in tandem.

¶12 If this seems artificially schematic consider some of the examples we’ve seen in the
previous chapters. As Craig Sapp’s graphical analyses of Chopin mazurkas show so
clearly, 13 expressivity operated typically from moment to moment earlier in the 20th
century, and at the next level up, from phrases to phrase more commonly later on. It’s
not difficult to see different performances by the same person as a manifestation of
expressivity operating on a larger scale: the performer’s expressive profile, their
personal style, is mapped by just those differences and by the frame within which they
remain. Similarly a period’s style is mapped by the differences between many
musicians’ performances and by the limits within which they are confined. They too
constitute together collective expressivity through music. It doesn’t make good sense to
insist on a fundamental difference between any of these layers of expressive activity.

¶13 Conceiving them all together is another matter though. We are very good at
adapting to changes on the small scale. In fact it’s that process that makes musical
performances musical as small irregularities in the sound surface communicate some
kind of meaning (however abstract or emotional) between performer and listener. But
on a large scale it’s extremely hard for us to understand what on earth was going on.
How could audiences in 1900 have taken seriously Lilli Lehmann’s singing or Leopold
Auer’s playing? There can hardly be a listener to early recordings, unless brought up on
them exclusively from birth, who has not initially had this reaction. The difficulty of
this first encounter, and the time it takes listeners unfamiliar with them to enjoy early
recordings, clearly indicate that people then understood what they heard quite
differently from the way we understand it now.

¶14 To see this more clearly let’s return now to the example that opened chapter 4. We
found there in the reactions of one modern critic, uncomfortable (I think we can
assume) with early recordings, a degree of alarm at the idea that performances like
Elena Gerhardt’s might be taken seriously today. Why alarm? What makes them not
just alien but threatening? Presumably it’s that at some level we do recognise what it is
that the singer is doing to be expressive, and that indeed she is expressive, powerfully
so. We hate the way she does it, but that it works on its own terms makes it potentially
challenging to the way we would do it today. Suppose young singers started to copy
her? Would we then begin to experience a manner of emotional communication that
threatened to rewrite our current rules of personal interaction, that might require us to
feel more deeply, or to feel deeply more publicly about the power of this music? What
would it be like to be in an audience that was collectively as deeply moved by ‘An die
Musik’ as Gerhardt seemed to be? By current standards it would be embarrassing. It’s
our habit to admire the beauty and poise and subtlety of Schubert, and to find sexual
subtexts, 14 but not to be moved to intense feeling by his music in a way that others can
see or share.

¶15 So we recognise what early recorded singers are communicating, by understanding

the means they use, yet we don’t experience it as they did. We resist their experience in
favour of our own, at any rate on first exposure to it. The question, then, is whether, in
adapting to it as we become expert listeners to early recordings, we develop in ourselves
the same responses that originally gave rise to that style and which it generated in
listeners. Do those of us who now like the way Gerhardt’s generation sang and played
make the same sense of it as they did? Well, yes and no. When we first hear a
performance like this, and laugh at it, it’s because those signs of emotion that she makes
now signal parody. Somebody singing like that today would be in pantomime,
mimicking, with slapstick humour, wildly exaggerated emotional posturing. We can
learn gradually to alter our responses so as to become sympathetic to her approach,
recognising the sincerity of her response to the text and music. But we can never belong
to a culture in which that expression is natural in an artistic situation. We wouldn’t sing
like that ourselves. And this is the acid test, which so far very few modern musicians
have come near to passing. You can’t reproduce these styles of performance by
calculation, but only by feeling those sounds work musically and translating that feeling
into the motions required to make them. If you can do that you’re half way towards
understanding how it felt then. But the other half of the journey would have to consist of
becoming so much a part of that expressive world that all your playing or singing had
that style as its default, as what came naturally to you.

¶16 Something of this magnitude has happened to baroque violinists and their
colleagues specialising in period performance. The difference here is that the style they
have made is a modern style, and so of course fits perfectly with current taste. 15 And so
it’s not really the same thing. Perhaps performers will come to specialise in early
recorded styles so exclusively that they will reach the same stage, and then we shall
indeed be able to learn a huge amount from them about early 20th-century performance
by studying them. But it remains to be seen whether there will ever be the market for
this sort of development, especially given that we have the recordings to listen to and
methods of cleaning them up are getting better all the time.

¶17 All this said, not everything has changed. Readers will have noticed, both from the
examples used here and also from their everyday experience of listening to music (and
this has been confirmed in more empirical work), 16 that across the recorded century it is
generally the same points in a score that get emphasised, whatever the expressive means
for giving emphasis may by at any one time. Phrase-ends, the highest notes, the
metrically strongest beats, harmonic cruxes, new sections, tend in all recorded
performance styles to be emphasised one way or another. So clearly there are aspects
our response to musical structure that remain relatively stable across centuries. How
many centuries we can’t say because we’ve not had recording for long enough. Features
dependent on tonality won’t go back as far as features dependent on melodic structure,
for example, but there must have been continuity at the level of musical structure over
long periods of time, much longer than periods in which performance style was stable.
And that means that some of the things performers do performers have always done,
while others differ from generation to generation, even while tending to occur in the
same places in which performers did other things before. We just can’t know, save for
the evidence of recording, which are which.

¶18 To take one example, but a significant one, consider the changes in portamento and
vibrato during the first half of the 20th century. We’ve seen that at the same time as
portamento gradually declined vibrato speeds gradually slowed and vibrato widths
deepened. It seems reasonable to suggest that some of the expressive work done by
portamento was gradually transferring to vibrato. Other factors were changing too, for
example speeds were slowing, so it’s not safe to assume that the transfer was exclusive:
patterns of change must have been more complex. And we can’t assume either that the
expressive effect on listeners was the same after the transfers as before, nor, therefore,
that performers deployed vibrato in the same way they’d deployed portamento. But
some exchange probably occurred, presumably because portamento seemed less
appropriate in a larger communicative context (perhaps for reasons to do with the rise of
modernism), 17 and vibrato more so. It’s certainly striking that the greatest increase in
vibrato width comes exactly at the point (the later 1940s and early 50s) at which
portamento ceases to be routine. 18 Of course vibrato doesn’t do exactly what
portamento did: you can’t use it to join two notes, and it doesn’t model baby-talk; but it
does similar expressive work, and that’s the level at which expressivity remains more
stable.

¶19 How stable? Is modern performance overall as expressive as early recorded

performance? That’s very difficult to answer impressionistically, and it would be even
harder scientifically. One’s first thought is ‘no’, but it’s also possible that expressivity is
simply fragmented in modern performance styles, distributed in smaller amounts over a
greater number of parameters or even a greater number of places in a score: tiny
changes at the microsecond level contributing cumulatively a similar effect to larger
changes that once took longer and so happened less often. It certainly seems unwelcome
to suggest that music is less moving now that it was 100 years ago to the extent that
listening would engage one less or leave one less satisfied. Nevertheless, these are
questions that need to be considered and to be investigated more thoroughly, and
preferably more scientifically in the future if we want to understand more about what
style change means and about how music works in performance.

¶20 What are the mechanisms by which style changes? It’s hard to avoid proposing a
neo-Darwinian evolutionary analogy because selection of the environmentally fittest
provides such a powerful explanation for a process of change so gradual as to be
unnoticeable at a local level and yet transformative over time. 19 As we’ve seen, there
are a lot of factors that may influence the nature of change in performance style, many
of them from beyond music, so any proposal that hopes to be practical or
comprehensible needs for now to look at just a small part of the whole picture. Let’s
assume, therefore, for the sake of clarity, that performance changes mainly through
influence from one player to another. It can’t be that simple, but that must constitute
part of the story. How would that work? Presumably musicians develop in their first two
decades (substantially less in the case of prodigies like Patti or Rubinstein) through
modelling themselves on players (or singers: let’s take that as read from now on) whom
they hear around them and according to templates set out by their teachers. But by the
end of their training certain individual characteristics will begin, in the most able, to
become audible. 20 There cannot be too many of these, nor can they depart by very much
from the norm—otherwise the playing style will be rejected by critics, work will dry up
and they will no longer be heard and be able to influence anyone else. Throughout their
lives musicians are also hearing other players and are adopting from them, no doubt
often without realising, features of personal style that they find particularly effective.
Habits that seem useful to many players will spread quite fast, habits that don’t will die
out. How fast depends on how many other players are heard, especially during the early
years. Hence hothouses of musical education, such as Berlin, will have a
disproportionate effect in diversifying performance style. And when one looks at the
number of musicians discussed in this book who trained there in the decades around
1900 it becomes less surprising that style changed so much in the early 20th century.

¶21 Recording disseminated performance styles too, but what would its effect have
been? The common assumption at the moment is that it would have tended to
homogenise playing by spreading a norm far and wide. Yet was a norm recorded in the
early years? No, on the contrary, we are surprised by the diversity of styles represented
on cylinders and early 78s. If anything, early recordings probably diversified more than
they reduced personal styles. But not for long: there is no question that over a longer
period of time, once listening to recordings became common—and very noticeably by
the second half of the century—the mingling of styles produced something very much
more uniform overall. Even so—and this is the interesting point, not always given
enough emphasis—it remained notably varied at the micro level and continued to
change rapidly.

¶22 A genetic analogy can explain how this works. In small and isolated populations a
few powerful individuals can ensure that their genes come to dominate the population as
a whole. It may be very different from other populations, but there will be little change
within it except by chance mutation, which is much easier at the genetic level than in
society, where artificial rules tend to inhibit change over time. An isolated musical
society, therefore, would tend to maintain its traditions rather strictly, producing a
recognisable ‘school’ of playing.

¶23 But musical populations were never all that isolated. Musicians have always
travelled in search of work. So even though a national or local tradition might be
confined there’s no reason to suppose that many became moribund or decayed,
whatever that would mean in musical terms—perhaps a form of mannerism so extreme
that no one outside the immediate circle would find it persuasively musical.
Nevertheless, exchange would have been constrained: most musicians would be local in
most traditions.

¶24 Recording, however, would function almost as effectively to cause musical styles to
coalesce as did increased mobility. When migration leads gene pools to mingle, two
things happen: on the large scale, features of both races mix and after a few generations
it becomes increasingly hard to say whether an individual belongs to one or the other;
but on the small scale, because the population is genetically more varied, a much wider
range of mutations occurs than would have been possible with fewer and less
genetically diverse individuals. Some of these will be useful and will survive through
natural selection, and over time there will be more rapid evolution than is possible in
smaller groups.

¶25 What this means for musical performance—though one can’t check this reliably
against evidence, since before recording there isn’t enough—is likely to be that while
general features of performance style have become homogenised, there is much more
variation between individuals than there was before, and there is more rapid change in
performance style over time. Styles would be more similar from place to place at any
one time, but they would change more quickly because, through recordings, individual
mutations were disseminated so much more rapidly. What little evidence there is
suggests that this is so. We know that performance style has changed hugely during the
past hundred years, because we can hear it on record. We can’t hear it any earlier, but
the treating of 18th- and 19th-century performance practice together in single studies
based on the surviving teaching manuals tends to leave the impression that there was
much more consistency during the 19th and 18th centuries. 21 There may, as I suggested
earlier in chapter 4, be an element of wishful thinking there: it would certainly be very
convenient for students of historical performance practice to be able to argue that
recordings c.1900 tell us much about earlier performance; but if recordings and the
democratisation of travel contributed to a pooling of performance styles then the genetic
analogy suggests that they may have a point. Styles may have changed more slowly the
earlier one goes back in time.

¶26 On the other hand, as I’ve already suggested, there is good reason to believe that
styles were already changing quite rapidly by the time recording began. We’ve seen
how few performers like Patti or Joachim seem to represent the old, simpler, pre-
verismo style, and how old they were when recording began, and we’ve seen that even
middle-aged performers were already using a more modern style. It seems very
possible, then, that a significant shift had taken place before recordings began. This
should come as some relief to proponents of all but the most rigorous HIP, because if
styles were still changing slowly in the second half of the 19th century we shall have to
consider the possibility that Beethoven and Mozart sounded more like Paderewski and
Patti than Levin and Kirkby, and I’m not sure that that is what historically informed
performers at the moment really want to hear. We looked at Mozart played by Carl
Reinecke in chapter 6 and I doubt that many hope it may tell us much about Mozart. We
shall never know. And this a peculiarity of our present situation. We have had
recordings for long enough to have difficulty with the past but not for long enough to
know how it works out over centuries. Do performance styles change continuously, or
in leaps, or do they go in cycles? Will future generations develop performance stylistic
worlds in which Gerhardt’s singing again makes perfect sense? A hundred years of
evidence isn’t nearly enough for us to hypothesise.

¶27 The theory of runaway sexual selection offers some insight into this. According to
Geoffrey Miller, ‘Music is what happens when a smart, group-living, anthropoid ape
stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of runaway sexual selection for complex
acoustic displays.’ 22 Like the proverbial peacock’s tail, the ability to sing well is taken
as a sign of power—the animal has the strength to survive despite putting himself (it is
almost always males that provide the display) at risk of attack from predators by
stopping and singing extravagantly, and so females are successfully attracted. Runaway
selection, the process by which ever more extravagant vocal displays are required to
out-bid rival males, leads vocalisations to develop into ever-more sophisticated forms
leading over time to human music. Miller’s theory could benefit from much more
detailed substantiation, but as a hypothesis it is surprisingly fruitful. Runaway selection
is rather a plausible explanation for some extremes of human composition and
performance style, for instance the 14th-century ars subtilior or 20th-century atonality,
or, indeed, the ultra-expressive singing and playing characteristic of the first thirty years
of recording. Whether any of these was an effective way of attracting sexual partners is
perhaps no longer the point. Runaway selection could be fired almost as powerfully by
economic gain or popular acclaim or (in the case of composition) by peer-group esteem
(which provides an almost complete explanation for integral serialism).

¶28 If sexual competition drove the development of musical skills in the past it’s
unlikely to have gone entirely away. One of its consequences, paradoxically, is
ritualisation, the tendency for strongly attractive behaviours to become fixed, and as a
result of becoming fixed no longer to be noticed as exceptionally attractive. Smart
animals are able to gain advantages by modifying ritualised behaviour in order to attract
attention to themselves from smart, novelty-seeking mates. As Geoffrey Miller points
out, drawing on Huxley, 23 among modern humans ‘neophilia is so intense that it drives
a substantial proportion of the global economy’; while among our hominid ancestors he
suspects that ‘it favoured not so much diversity of sexual partners but selection of
highly creative partners, capable of generating continuous behavioural novelty
throughout the long years necessary to collaborate on raising children.’(346)

¶29 In the light of this tension between ritualisation and creativity we can perhaps think
of musical style change (both performance and composition style) as bouncing around
between extremes reached through runaway selection while trying to improve on a
widely-popular mean of ritualisation. Thus style would tend towards a ritualised mean
with which many felt comfortable, which might be characterised by such traits as
relative faithfulness to the score, restrained rubato, and so on. Yet from time to time, as
it became just too comfortable to be interesting to younger musicians, the more
adventurous among them would aim to be more attractive by extending expressivity in
one or other of the available dimensions, either pitch, rhythmic, or amplitude
modification, or some combination of the three (as for example in neo-baroque
articulation which deals in modified note-lengths and loudnesses). After which others
might bounce style off in another direction, only for it to return in due course towards
the mean, but no doubt a slightly different mean than before. Extremes would include
such states as atonality in composition, or in performance hyperexpressivity as in the
20s or inexpressivity as in Bach playing in the 50s; and the bouncing back from an
extreme happens whenever that extreme reaches such a point that its costs outweigh its
benefits. For example, atonality has clearly reached that state by the mid-70s when
minimalism, which wouldn’t have had a hope earlier, came to many as a timely relief.
The hyperexpressivity of the 20s and 30s, as I’ve argued, 24 was too costly in cultural
terms once the horrors perpetrated by its German contemporaries made it seem
unforgivably complacent. The inexpressivity of hardcore HIP was far too costly in
terms of lost musical meaning for it to survive the introduction of new expressivity by
Brüggen, Harnoncourt and others.

¶30 Another way of understanding style change, entirely compatible, is to think of

elements of musical culture as viruses (with Dan Sperber) or with Richard Dawkins as
memes, 25 units of culture that spread among human populations. 26 To make any quasi-
genetic analogy work it is essential to allow for the fact that in cultural transmission
nothing physical is passed from one person to another. Rather, something that one
person does is imitated by another. Imitated, not copied; or copied only in the
humanities sense that copies are never exact. It’s the imperfection of the copy that
causes the far more rapid evolution of culture than the evolution of life. A gene may be
copied exactly over tens of thousands of generations before a useful mutation occurs.
But a meme—some cultural habit or concept—is remade slightly differently every time
it is picked up by one human from another. There are many more potentially useful
variants in circulation, and there are probably many fewer constraints on ‘usefulness’ as
well. And so culture changes very fast indeed, yet through ‘units’ of habit or concept
that may be unnoticeably indistinct or blindingly obvious or anywhere in-between.

¶31 Musical performance is an extremely fertile environment for the exchange and
modification of habits of expression. The extent to which listeners (including
performers) can apply varied meanings to sounds, and so to find newly-shaped sounds
meaningful (newly-shaped as a result of some quasi-mutation in performance style),
even though they may be unfamiliar, allows a great many mutations to be found useful
and so to be developed and passed on in turn. The main brake on the process is the
professional advantage to performers in not modifying their performance habits once
those have been satisfactorily established. Performers have quite enough to do in
recreating at the highest possible level of excellence, time after time, compositions that
are very hard to perform well, without also opening up their performances to new
influences by listening to others and adapting and incorporating their ideas. Hence the
predominant tendency of performers to maintain a fairly consistent style over their
lifetimes. But as we’ve seen there are exceptions, and we need to be sensitive to the
possibility of influence at any moment.

¶32 So how informative individual performers are about the styles of their youth has to
depend on their personal susceptibility to influence. It isn’t hard to suppose that some
would be less susceptible than others to infection, their quasi-antibodies strengthened by
disposition and perhaps by particularly strict training. At the opposite extreme, some
performers would be infected unusually easily. We can see Rubinstein as one example
of that, Arleen Auger (chapter 4) another. A more challenging example is that of Lotte
Lenya. 27 Lenya’s performance style changed more radically than any other performer I
can think of, greatly altering the reception of Kurt Weill’s compositions in the process.
But rather than taking in memes from around her and allowing them to transform her
singing it seems far more likely that she became an exceptionally powerful cultural
virus herself (powerful both politically and musically) infecting others with unusual
virulence, so that her later style was universally adopted by other singers for performing
Weill. Most players are only lightly inf(l)ected by exposure to others, however, so that
symptoms are small enough to be very hard to spot, yet the accumulation of mutations
across populations over a generation can still produce noticeable change in general
performing style. It’s harder to recognise as it happens around one than when one can
look back on it from a distance, but there are good reasons to think that style is still
changing now, and in a more expressive direction, perhaps influenced in part by the
easy availability of reissued early recordings. But this is only an impression, and in
retrospect the situation in the early 21st century may look quite different.

• <Back to top>
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Footnotes

1.
Some of the ideas in this chapter are more fully worked-out in Leech-Wilkinson
(forthcoming, 2009), written soon after this book. Back to context...
2.
Plack (2008) is precisely about the relationship between the capabilities of the
instrument (the voice) and the singer’s performance style. Back to context...
3.
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, ‘Musicology and performance’, in ed. Zdravko
Blazekovic, Music's Intellectual History: Founders, Followers & Fads (New
York: RILM, forthcoming). See also Day (2000), 178-85, on Webern
performance. Back to context...
4.
Johnson identifies another instance of a scholar understanding a piece
analytically in the light of a particular performance tradition. (Johnson (1999),
98). Back to context...
5.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006b). Back to context...
6.
Watt & Ash (1998). See also Patrick Shove & Bruno Repp, ‘Musical motion and
performance: theoretical and empirical perspectives’, in Rink (1995), 55-83;
Neil Todd, ‘The dynamics of dynamics: a model of musical expression’, Journal
of the Acoustical Society of America 91 (1992), 3540-50; Neil Todd, ‘The
kinematics of musical expression’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
97 (1995), 1940-9; Neil Todd, ‘Motion in music: a neurobiological perspective’,
Music Perception 17 (1999), 115-26. Back to context...
7.
For other views of the performer as actor, narrator, director or protagonist see
Janet Schmalfeldt, ‘On the relation of analysis to performance: Beethoven’s
bagatelles op. 126, nos. 2 and 5’, Journal of Music Theory 29 (1985), 1-31; L.
Henry Shaffer, ‘How to interpret music’, in ed. Mari Riess Jones and Susan
Holleran, Cognitive Bases of Musical Communication (Washington: American
Psychological Association, 1992), 263-78; Lester (1995); and Clarke (1995).
Back to context...
8.
One of the best studies to date is Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction,
emotion, and the cinema (Oxford University Press, 1994), especially good on
audience perceptions, an aspect of film and theatre which one might think
central but which has been almost entirely ignored by scholars in the field. For a
more theoretical approach see Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of
Film (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Back to context...
9.
Repp (1992). Back to context...
10.
The relationship between vibrato and emotional state is much discussed in ed.
Seashore (1932) and ed. Seashore (1936). Back to context...
11.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006b). Back to context...
12.
A model of music in terms of icon, index and symbol, drawing on empirical
research (as well as on Peirce), is offered by W. Jay Dowling and Dane L.
Harwood, Music Cognition (San Diego: Academic Press, 1986). Some of the
difficulties with these categories are outlined by Lavy (2001). Using the terms,
as I do here, somewhat loosely (though not without consideration in each case)
reflects the far from clear distinctions that can be made when they are applied to
music, especially in performance. For a musicological approach see Raymond
Monelle, The Sense of Music: semiotic essays (Princeton University Press,
2000), esp. chapters 2 & 3. Back to context...
13.
http://mazurka.org.uk/ana/hicor/, mentioned above: see especially the
hierarchical average plots. Back to context...
14.
See the discussion of Fischer-Dieskau and Kramer in chapter 4 above. Back to
context...
15.
Taruskin (1988 & 1995). Back to context...
16.
Bruno Repp, ‘Diversity and commonality in music performance: an analysis of
timing microstructure in Schumann's “Träumerei”’, Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 92 (1992), 2546-68; Bruno Repp, ‘The timing implications
of musical structures’, in ed. David Greer, Musicology and sister disciplines:
Past, present, and future (Oxford University Press, 2000), 6070. Renee
Timmers, ‘Vocal expression in recorded performances of Schubert songs’,
Musicae Scientiae 11 (2007), 237-68. Back to context...
17.
As suggested in Leech-Wilkinson (2006b). Back to context...
18.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006b), 261. Back to context...
19.
Since this chapter was written Steven Jan has published The Memetics of Music
(Jan 2007). Although it pays no attention to performance, and I think
underestimates the mutability of musical memes, it does offer a very interesting
way of thinking about the evolution of compositional figures. Back to context...
20.
An experimental study has shown that young performers are influenced by
model performances of others, but in very individual ways, which corresponds
well with the assumptions made here. (Tânia Lisboa, Aaron Williamon,
Massimo Zicari & Hubert Eiholzer, ‘Mastery through imitation: a preliminary
study’, Musicae Scientiae 19 (2005), 75-110.) Back to context...
21.
Brown (1999); Stowell (1985); Potter (2006). Back to context...
22.
Geoffrey Miller, ‘Evolution of human music through sexual selection’, in ed.
Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, & Steven Brown, The Origins of Music
(Cambridge, MA.: MIT, 2000), 329-60 at 349. Back to context...
23.
Miller (2000), 345. Back to context...
24.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006b), 249-50 & 253-4. Back to context...
25.
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: a naturalistic approach (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976; 2nd
rev. ed. 1989), esp. chapter 11. Back to context...
26.
There is good reason to recognise elements of culture in some animal species
too, including some primates and in whale song which, like human musical
performance, changes from year to year (Katharine Payne, ‘The progressively
changing songs of Humpback whales: a window on the creative process in a
wild animal’, in Wallin et al. (2000), 135-50). On social transmission in animals
see Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: how culture
transformed human evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 104-6. Back
to context...
27.
An example was offered in Leech-Wilkinson (1984), p. 16, note 8. Back to
context...
©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, England, United Kingdo
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Document Contents

• 8. Expressive gestures
o 8.1. Performance expression
o 8.2. A methodology for studying expression and expressive gestures
o 8.3. Sounds from speech, sounds from life
o 8.4. Music can model...
o 8.5. Expressivity and signification in instrumental music

8. Expressive gestures
8.1. Performance expression

¶1 We’ve seen quite a lot of examples of performance style, and of the way it has
changed, and we’ve thought a bit about why. But what is it? What defines it in sound?
And how does it work?

¶2 A style isn’t easy to define fully, though it’s easier in music than in most other
domains. Think of the difficulty of precisely defining style in painting or clothing, for
example: at least in music it’s easy to measure the constituent elements—the sounds—
and because they come in sequence you don’t have to consider them all at once. But
even so there is still the problem of drawing boundaries between styles. As we’ve seen
in talking about period and personal styles, a performer does some things that all
performers do, and some that all performers at any one time do, as well as things that
some do but not others, and things that only she herself does. To know which level we
were defining we’d have to be able to say which of these stylistic features belonged to
each. And to do that properly would require a database of all recorded performances and
a means of analysing the data. Nicholas Cook and Craig Sapp have been doing
something along these lines for recordings of Chopin mazurkas—we looked at some of
the techniques in chapter 6—and have made real progress in turning recordings into
machine-readable data and developing software routines that can sort through them. The
better we get at that the more useful things we’ll be able to say about performance style
with real precision. In the meantime we can make some worthwhile progress simply by
determining what sorts of things constitute a performance style and by looking at
examples of them in practice.

¶3 Let’s start with a simple definition. Performance style is generated by what

performers habitually do with the notation to make a musical performance. This is a
convenient generalisation if we’re talking about classical music. Actually we don’t have
to define it in relation to notation; but there has to be something that is being shaped in
consistent ways for there to be style. Let’s take a more extreme example to clarify the
point. Jazz uses very little notation: its common material, the bases for performances,
are often no more than simple melodies whose precise details no one may quite agree
about. But nevertheless they exist recognisably—you know them when you hear
them—and it’s their elaboration that makes a performance. All that elaboration is
stylistic. The performer plays and elaborates the core materials by bringing to it a
manner of decoration, harmonisation, timing, pitch adjustment, dynamic shaping that
could equally well be applied to many other melodies. In jazz, variations of tempo and
pitch and dynamic are everything. The style is to a very large extent the music. But
except for the fact that jazz players feel freer than classical musicians to make their own
contribution to the harmony and melody, what makes jazz jazz are precisely the things
that we’re looking at in studying classical music performance. There’s a ‘text’ and there
is elaboration of it as it is realised in sound. And the way that elaboration is done
constitutes the performance style.

¶4 If we want to define a performance style, then, we’re going to need to look at

everything except the given material, which for classical music is the notation. We can
test this definition by looking at a literal performance of the notation, which if this
definition is correct should have no style. Listen again to Sound File 3 (wav file) from
chapter 2 and see what you think. We still have the composition style, but it doesn’t
make a great deal of sense. Perhaps the MIDI piano is contributing a minuscule sense of
shaping to each note by its attack, which someone has programmed to sound like a
person playing a piano. But there’s not a lot left that we can easily recognise as musical.
What do we mean by musical? Performance style and musicality are essentially the
same phenomenon, except that ‘musical’ adds to performance style the notion of
persuasiveness. Like performance style, ‘musical’ means the ability to play notes in
ways not specified precisely in the score, but it also means doing that convincingly. So
performing musically, or stylishly, involves modifying those aspects of the sound that
our instrument allows us to modify, and doing it in a way that brings to the performance
a sense that the score is more than just a sequence of pitches and durations. ‘More’ in
what sense?

¶5 The answer is key to music-making. For perceptual reasons that will become clearer
as we go along, these elaborations of the raw instructions in the score, including the
modifications of the literally notated lengths, pitches and loudnesses, have the effect for
the listener of making the music expressive. By making a note the wrong length (by not
doing exactly what the notation says) we change it from a pitch with a duration into a
sound that moves us in some way. How a sound modifies our emotional state is a big
subject; we’ll find some answers being suggested by the effects we see in our examples.
Ultimately it is a problem for neurology and psychology and for empirical study. But
for the moment we can approach a general understanding of what happens by
considering it as a music-analytical problem in which we interpret the relationship
between what we hear and what we feel. And that is what we shall be doing in the rest
of this chapter. We’re going to be looking at things performers do in sound and trying to
work out how those things affect us as we listen.

¶6 The expressivity we experience through a performance seems to shift all the time,
from moment to moment during a performance. One moment may seem to stand out,
the next to be more restrained; one note may be rasping, the next softer-edged, and so
on; and it seems to follow that expressivity is caused by brief events that happen
frequently. One can take any strong example and begin to see relatively easily what
kinds of events these are and why they seem to suggest certain kinds of meaning.

Plate 9: Essie Ackland, 'the wave of the golden corn', from Schubert's 'Die
Allmacht' (1932)

¶7 Listen to this example. (Sound File 26 (wav file)) 1 It’s from a performance of
Schubert’s ‘Die Allmacht’ recorded (in English) by Essie Ackland in 1932; she’s
singing about the presence of God in all things. Here the words are ‘see’st it in the wave
of the golden corn’. I’m interested in how she sings ‘the wave’. It’s unmistakably wave-
like, but how does she do that? The spectrogram shows an outline of what she does;
slowing down the recording (using Sonic Visualiser, of which more below) gives us
more aural detail (Sound File 27 (wav file)). As she sings ‘the’ she lets the pitch glide
from the notated G down to E. Then there is less clearly pitched sound as she moves her
tongue from the ‘uh’ position of ‘the’ to the ‘wuh’ of ‘wave’, which passes through ‘rr’
somewhere around C. (This seems curious to us, but a Scottish inflexion of ‘the’, ending
with the tongue curving round to ‘rr’, was common in early 20th-century English
singing.) The ‘w’ starts around D and glides more slowly up to the notated F becoming
the ‘ay’ vowel on the way at about E-flat.

¶8 That’s a rather detailed description of an effect that is perceived more holistically as

a wave-like start to ‘wave’, which as the spectrogram shows is exactly what it is. The
wave motion covers far more pitches than the two notated (G and F for ‘the wave’), so
this is very clearly something brought by the performer to the notation. And it produces
a sounding image of the word in the text. Although it’s a wave in sound rather than in
golden corn, our brains easily map the sound image onto the visual image and perceive
them as equivalent. It’s a metaphor, but not an abstract literary one, rather a real mental
effect as the brain makes a connection between one kind of wave and another. Adding
one to the other makes the text’s wave more vivid. We feel more of that wave than we
would without the sound image: indeed, without the sound image we probably wouldn’t
feel it at all unless we had a particularly vivid imagination. So the music is doing some
extra work for us, forcing us to perceive that wave whether we want to or not.

¶9 We have in this little example a complete demonstration of the process by which

performance expressivity works. The performer does something to the sound not
specified by the musical structure. What he does the listener’s brain analyses, as a
normal part of the process of ‘perceiving’ sound. In one of many complex processes—
involving the analysis of pitch, loudness and timing, and the construction from them of
best guesses as to the sound’s source and meaning—the brain searches for similarities
between those features and things it already knows about, and sends back into
consciousness (which may simply mean that these are the strongest matches found)
perceptions of those things that seem to match best. Since it’s getting incoming
information from the text about waving corn, that match is made most immediately,
along with memories of wave shapes and waving in general, pictures of golden corn,
and whatever else each of us may individually associate with these sounds and images.
Some kind of mental picture of the singer, based on the sound of her voice and what we
imagine of the environment in which people sang like this may be mixed in more
weakly.

¶10 What all this amounts to is a sense that this passing moment has meaning, of which
the sounds are expressive. It’s meaning and expressivity that is not inherent in the score
but that arises from the performance. And the things the performer does to construct this
meaning expressively are elements of her performance style. She does them like this
because they are consistent with her own manner of being expressive in performance. In
Ackland’s case they are relatively strong because that was the norm in her day, and
especially in performances of religiose songs in English for a general music-loving
audience. (The disc was issued in HMV’s popular series C, part of the cheap ‘plum
label’.) Ackland is gauging an appropriate stylistic context within which to pitch this
performance. Then she is using her own imaginative responses to the text, calling up
images in vision and using her voice to convert those into similar motions in sound. She
doesn’t need to think this out in detail. Our brains work fast enough to manage largely
through feelings this process of finding appropriate metaphors and generating sounds to
represent them, which it can do in microseconds, far too fast for us to think much about.
The singer draws on experience, both of singing and of sounds in life, to shape her
singing in ways that feel right for the musical and textual moment. That both the
making and the perceiving of these effects depends on feelings more than thinking only
serves to integrate the process more fully with our emotional state, which is mainly
what music modulates when we listen unanalytically (that is to say, normally) to a
performance.

¶11 The whole process depends on our naturally selected ability to make connections
within and between incoming data streams, generating perceptions of the world outside
us that enable us to react appropriately in the interests of survival and reproduction.
Survival and reproduction may seem rather far from performing Schubert’s ‘Die
Allmacht’, but we respond to sounds in this way because over time it’s enabled our
evolutionary ancestors to react usefully to sounds around them, enabling them to
distinguish with minute precision between the meanings of one sound and another.

¶12 I’ve allowed this description to go so far into perception and evolution because they
are both fundamental to our normal everyday responses to music, and a lot of musical
performance effects can only be properly understood in this context. Music is so
powerful not because it’s a set of codes invented by individuals over that past few
centuries that we’ve all been required to learn—that couldn’t make it powerful, only
familiar—but because it uses naturally selected responses, most of them long pre-
human, and uses them automatically without waiting for our conscious mind to work
out what’s going on. 2 No wonder, then, that expressive performance brings so much to
music, indeed is essential to bring music to life. And ‘to life’ is the right metaphor,
indeed it’s hardly a metaphor at all, because that is exactly what expressive performance
does. It brings life to composed structures which without it exist only as ideas sketched
out in notation.

¶13 It’s easy to see how this process connects with the discussion of music and
performance in chapter 2. Compositions become music when performers link notes with
sounds, shapes, and processes we know from life. The way performers link them is
strongly influenced by performance style. Using metaphorical practices common to
their place and time, performers inflect notes in order to make them expressive of
feelings, and thereby to bring them meaning. We can think of these inflections as
expressive gestures, expressive because they represent meaning, and gestures because
they shape notes over time in the same way, and for the same purpose, that humans use
their hands and face to communicate information about the dynamic shape of a process
and about its effect. 3 The metaphor of shape is absolutely fundamental to musical
communication. Music makes shapes in sound over time: sounds gets higher or lower,
louder or softer, faster or slower, and their timbre changes, and each and all of those
processes we understand as shaping sound. There may be a spatial element in our
perception as well—that remains to be demonstrated, but it is a possibility that needs
testing. At any rate, it’s exactly this changing of any or several parameters of a sound
that does the expressive work in performances, so ‘expressive gesture’ seems as good a
way of labelling these inflections as we are likely to find.

¶14 There’s one other point that needs to be made before we go on to look at many
different examples of expressive gestures from recordings. How large these gestures
are, and so how obvious to the listener, varies over time with changes in period
performance style. Early in the 20th century, especially during the 1920s and 30s, they
were very large; later, especially in the 1960s and 70s, they were often very small,
barely noticeable in casual listening although one would notice at once if they were
missing. In our own time gestures are typically still a lot smaller than in Essie
Ackland’s day, but I’ll be focussing on her period to an unrepresentative degree because
it’s much easier to understand the process if we begin with the strongest examples. For
listeners today, especially for academic listeners who’ve been trained to search for
unobvious meanings in music, things no one has noticed before, performance gestures
this large and with metaphorical associations this obvious can be embarrassing or seem
trivial. But that is simply a measure of the emotional distance between us and pre-War
listeners which we’ve already seen in chapter 4. In due course we can begin to work on
more recent performance styles where shaping is far more subtle and far more to our
taste. But if you don’t like overtly expressive performance you’ll have to bide your
time. We need to know what kinds of processes are involved in musical performance
before we’ll be able to see them more subtly at work.

¶15 An expressive gesture can be defined as an irregularity in one or more of the

principal acoustic dimensions (pitch, amplitude, duration), introduced in order to give
emphasis to a note or chord—usually the start of a note or chord. Expressive gestures
involve sounding notes for longer or shorter, or louder or softer, or in some other way
different compared to the local average. Why the local average? Carl Seashore, and
many who have followed him, described these irregularities as deviations: ‘the artistic
expression of feeling in music consists in esthetic deviation from the regular—from
pure tone, true pitch, even dynamics, metronomic time, rigid rhythms etc’. 4 The
problem with that word is not only that it implies deviance, but also that it seems to
suppose that there is a proper length, loudness, or pitch for a note. In terms of the score
there may be, but as we’ve repeatedly seen the score is not the music, and nor is a
straight performance of it. So ‘deviation’ from the score is normal, in fact definitive of a
musical performance, and it’s not the fact that notes are not strictly as notated that
generates expressivity. Rather it’s how much they differ from their surroundings and
from what we’ve come to accept over the last few moments of listening is the (local)
norm. Difference from the score is not what’s expressive; change is.

¶16 So in musical performance, these changing loudnesses, timings and frequencies

work together locally, coordinated with the composed melody and harmony, to shape
the sounding music; and it’s a shape that consists mainly of alternating, sometimes
overlapping expansions and contractions. There are no fixed patterns, and no fixed
functions—everything depends on context. Gestures are combined together and placed
in sequence to give an expressive shape to a phrase of music, and phrases in turn can
work expressively within larger passages of music. But for the listener most of what
counts happens in the present, at the ‘now’ moment; and that deserves more of our
attention, I’d suggest, than our music-analytical training, with its emphasis on long-term
patters, leads us to expect. It’s around the now moment that our consciousness of
expressivity is most fully operational, and so it’s the local norm against which gestures
are perceived as expressive. 5

¶17 How did expression become so crucial in western art music performance? First, we
shouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s absent elsewhere. Rock music is highly
expressive, albeit in more consistent ways within each song (rather like early music),
not using the moment-to-moment shifts of mood characteristic of art music. So are
many world musics, and in a variety of ways. Perhaps what expressivity in western art
music (WAM) does is to replace one kind of bodily engagement with music, typically in
non-WAM contexts dance, with another, a kind that allows listeners to sit still in rows
and still have a deeply satisfying emotional experience, internalising bodily engagement
with the music. Expressive gesture in sound may do what physical gesture used to do,
and still does elsewhere, and the close relationship may still be suggested by our strong
inclination to call it ‘gesture’. It’s been turned into sound to suit a culture that thinks of
music as something needing full attention, cutting out visible actions as distracting, a
by-product of which has been the tendency of music as sound to become, at any rate
until recently, ever more complex. Expressivity has less of a role in the performance of
minimalist scores, and we may not be far wrong if we assume that it is closely tied to
the nature of musical composition as it developed from the late 16th to the end of the
20th century. Of course, without sound recordings we shall never know.

¶18 As I have said, expressive gestures are not fixed. Any kind of departure from
regularity can be expressive. But only a limited palette of gestures is used by one
performer, and only a limited set is in use in any period. This is what makes it possible
to use a repertoire of gestures to define an individual’s or a period’s performance style.
So a 'performance style' is a set of expressive gestures characteristic of an individual
performer that taken together constitute their 'personal style'; or a set characteristic of
a period ('period style'), or a group (for example, national style). Over time, the
gestures that constitute a period style change. One hundred years of evidence is not
much, and it’s far too soon to say whether they work to any substantial extent in cycles,
or whether the process of change is to all intents and purposes continuous. What we
have seen in previous chapters gives us some reason to suspect that the same gestures
are perceived somewhat differently in different periods. Although they may invoke
quite basic perceptual processes, the precise signification of an expressive gesture must
depend on its context to a very significant degree, and this is another reason to be wary
of any kind of dictionary of performance gestures that seeks to fix meanings: it is
essential to be sensitive to the local and period context in assigning any kind of meaning
to a gesture, and to localise that meaning within a particular performance. The one
general law we can be confident about is that a gesture makes its impact in proportion to
its size, that is, the degree to which it changes what was going on before.
8.2. A methodology for studying expression and expressive gestures

¶19 For this kind of study we need first of all a way of observing gestures at work in
their full sounding context. And we need to be able to examine them in more detail than
our ears allow. At the least, we need a way of training our brain to hear more precisely.
A means of measuring, to enable precise comparison, would be helpful.

¶20 One can do a lot just by listening closely. We do need to be able to listen to the
same passages repeatedly, so some means of storing a performance and of replaying it,
and parts of it, easily is essential. You can do this with a CD player, but you can do
much more with a sound file on a computer. Computer files are far easier to navigate,
and you can have several open at once and switch quickly between them, which makes
comparisons possible. So I’m going to assume in what follows that importing
recordings into a computer, and listening to them and viewing them there are possible.
We’ll make fuller use of the computer’s sound capabilities later on, but first I’d like to
recommend the virtues of close listening, allied to notation, pencil and paper.

¶21 You can practise close listening; in fact it requires practice, focussing one’s full
attention on the sound of the performance. After a time it’s surprising how much detail
one can hear, far more than in casual listening. Time spent with the visualisation
software we’ll use below will help you to know what are the acoustical components of
the sounds you hear, and you’ll be increasingly able to describe instruments and voices,
and momentary effects, in acoustic as well as in metaphorical terms. This isn’t the
natural place for an introduction to basic acoustics, but if you’ve not had one you need it
now. If you have, then skip to the next section.

Basic acoustics

¶22 All natural sounds are made up of several wave forms of different periodicity
sounding together. 6 For a musical pitch this typically consists of a fundamental—whose
frequency corresponds to the pitch you think you hear—plus a number of higher
frequency sounds of which you’re not consciously aware (the brain mixes them all
together for you) but which provide all your perceptual knowledge of the timbre of the
sound. All these frequencies are ‘harmonics’ (or ‘partials’), and the relative positions of
all those above the fundamental are fixed in relation to it. The first harmonic is the
fundamental itself, the second an octave above it, the third an octave and a fifth (a 12th)
above, the fourth two octaves, the fifth two octaves and a third, and so on, up the
harmonic series. 7 The higher they go the closer together they get and the more dissonant
they become. Most—typically all—of the ‘overtones’ are quieter than the fundamental,
but the louder the highest harmonics are the brighter the timbre of the sound. So
brightness is caused by the dissonances among the upper harmonics. If there are few
harmonics, or they get soft as they go up the scale, you’ll perceive a smoother, less
strident sound.

¶23 Frequencies are defined by the number of cycles of the wave per second. Modern
concert-pitch A above middle-C cycles 440 times per second. The number doubles with
each ascending octave, so the A above is 880cps or Hz (named after Heinrich Rudolf
Hertz), A below concert A is 220Hz. And so on. That means that as you go up the
frequency spectrum the number of cycles per second quickly gets very large indeed.
Young people can hear between about 30 and about 20,000Hz, but the ear is not able to
distinguish between that many different frequencies, and as sounds go up the spectrum
the ear is less and less able to tell them apart. It groups adjacent frequencies together
into bands, and gives the brain information about each band, but not about the
frequencies inside it. So sounds very high up seem less dissonant to us that they might if
we had sharper hearing. We’ll need to know this later on when we start to look at
sounds on computer displays. For similar reasons to do with the economical
construction of the human ear, louder frequencies may mask quieter frequencies nearby,
so we don’t hear all the frequencies that machines can tell us are actually present in a
sound. And this is another reason why music may sound more mellifluous to us that it
otherwise might.

¶24 The other thing that for music perception is crucial about human hearing is our
ability to distinguish sounds of different lengths. We can tell the difference between the
length of two sounds to within about 30 milliseconds difference, that’s 0.03 seconds. 8
Anything smaller than that we probably won’t notice if it comes within a sequence of
other sounds. We took account of this in chapter 6 when looking at Fanny Davies’s
rubato and in chapter 5 when looking at our concerto violinists’ portamento, and we’ll
come back to it when we look at spectrograms in a moment. Now we can go back to
close listening.

Close listening

¶25 It’s possible to do a certain amount of work using just a score, pencil and paper, and
your ears (and brain). In fact it’s an important exercise, because it’s all too easy to be
led into hearing things one can see on a computer screen but can’t perceive without one.
Just listening, and writing down what one hears, is often a very good way to get started
when studying a performance. It’s a good idea to be methodical about one’s close
listening and so the next group of examples suggests a way of keeping notes.

Figure 17: Marcella Sembrich, Nigel Rogers and Peter Schreier, Schubert,
'Wohin?', bb. 35-45

¶26 Figure 17 annotates the vocal line of an extract from Schubert’s ‘Wohin?’ (the
second song from Die schöne Müllerin), in order to indicate, using notation and some
fairly self-explanatory signs, how the three singers compared here shape and colour
their part. You can follow it with the sound files. There’s no agreed system for making
the annotations, so one just has to be as clear as possible.

¶27 Sound File 28 (wav file): Marcella Sembrich (1908) 9

¶28 Sound File 29 (wav file): Nigel Rogers (ca. 1975) 10

¶29 Sound File 30 (wav file): Peter Schreier (1989) 11

¶30 Table 5 suggests a way of organising comments on a number of obvious aspects of

the performance style. In each case the most important features, those that seem to do
most of the expressive work, are highlighted. It’s now easy to see how the focus of
singers’ attention appears to have shifted through the generations represented here (turn-
of-the-century, HIP, and modern) from portamento and rubato, through articulation, to
text illustration. I say ‘appears’ because first of all these singers have to be shown to be
representative: for that a large number of examples would be necessary. In fact it might
well be argued that Peter Schreier is exceptional, closer to Fischer-Dieskau in his
treatment of text than to most singers of today. So one has to be careful about the kinds
of conclusion one draws if one has only a few samples to hand, and this is true, needless
to say, whatever approach one takes to studying performances.

Table 5: Making notes on performance parameters

¶31 To get much further into details of sound one needs technological aids. I’ve said
earlier that at present much the best way of listening to a passage over and over is to
have it in a computer sound editing package, selecting the passage and either playing it
alone or setting the play control to loop it, so that it repeats over and over. Another thing
a sound editor can do that is invaluable is to align several different performances in a
single window, allowing us to switch between them as they play.

¶32 At the time of writing an ideal freeware audio editor is Audacity. Open the
program, then, using File > Open , open Sound File 13 (wav file), Elena Gerhardt’s
1911 ‘An die Musik’ with Arthur Nikisch. Then select File > Import and import Sound
File 31 (wav file), 12 Gerhardt’s 1924 recording of the same song, accompanied by
Harold Craxton. You should now have one above the other. If you press the Play button
at this point Audacity will play both together. To listen to them individually, and switch
quickly from one to another, either press Solo on the track you want, or Mute on the
track you don’t. Pressing Solo is of course the quickest way to switch, but Mute can be
useful when you have more than two tracks and wish to hear some but not all of them
together. If you want to hear exactly where the differences are you can align the two
tracks so that the performances coincide exactly at any point you choose, then play them
together to hear where they start to differ. To do this, select the Time Shift tool (the
button is in a small panel of six just to the right of the Record button, and is marked
with a two-way arrow: ). Then if you place the cursor on one or other track you’ll be
able to move it left or right. To play both tracks together make sure that neither Solo nor
Mute is selected.

¶33 To make the comparison easier I’ve matched the pitches of the two transfers,
reducing the 1924 by 74 cents (which of course makes it a little slower too, though not
nearly as slow as the 1911). 13 Listening to these two performances side by side proves
to be very interesting, and shows us similarities that it would be much harder to hear by
listening to one CD at a time. By switching back and forth between the two we can
quickly realise that although the rubato is very different, the way she shapes the notes
with vibrato and loudness is not. It’s actually almost the same performance except that
(and it’s a big exception) her rubato, though considerable, is nothing like as great in
1924 and has a somewhat different character (it’s not just proportionately reduced). It’s
a modernised performance in that single respect. 14 And this gives us a very useful clue
as to the way attitudes had already changed. Rubato was still very much part of current
style, but not to the same almost dangerous extent (dangerous because the performance
was always on the verge of stopping altogether) as in 1911. Although it’s so different,
Gerhardt’s later recording, when studied closely like this, actually confirms the tentative
suggestion made above that performers’ ways of approaching pieces tend to remain
relatively stable through their adult lives.

¶34 We can see, using the same technique, another very striking example of this in Sir
George Henschel’s two recordings of Schubert’s ‘Das Wandern’, made in 1914 and
1928. 15 (We looked at his 1928 performance, as well as at its coupling, ‘Der
Leiermann’, in chapter 4.) The CD reissue by Cheyne Records of the 1914 HMV
performance is lower and slower than either their or this book’s transfer of the
Columbia 1928 version. 16 (You can hear ours (by Andrew Hallifax) in Sound File 14
(wav file).) To enable the comparison I slowed down our transfer of the 1928 so as to
reduce the pitch by 110 cents. Once the pitches match, so do the speeds (which suggests
that at least one of the transfers was wrong), and the two performances are almost
identical. Only some rubato differences in the piano interludes, and at two of the ‘echo’
phrases that end each stanza, cause the two to get out of synch. It might be tempting to
suppose that 1928 was a dub of 1914, but in fact we have a control against which we
can test. By matching the pitch/speed of my transfer of 1928 to the Cheyne version of
the 1928 recording (a reduction of 28 cents in mine), and running the two
simultaneously, one can easily see that here we have two performances that are
genuinely identical: there is no variation in any detail, save only for a momentary speed
fluctuation in the middle caused probably by an instability in one of the turntables. This
gives us a measure, and enables us to use the 1914/28 comparison to say with certainty
that Henschel was able to give almost but not quite identical performances fourteen
years apart. 17 We’ve seen something similar, over almost thirty years, in Cortot’s
recorded performances of Chopin’s E minor Prelude, back in chapter 6. 18

¶35 This is really very fascinating. It’s an article of faith in most discussions of music-
making that every performance is different, and so they are; but it’s also important to
know that, when a performer plays a well-loved piece over and over in recitals and
studios for years on end, their performance settles into an almost unvarying ritual. It is
possible, then, to give substantially the same performance twice, indeed more than
twice; how unusual that is remains to be seen from further studies. 19 (One must admit,
too, that this is a composition that invites a very regular performance!) Experimental
evidence suggests that memory for musical tempo is extremely stable, not unlike
absolute pitch but in the time domain. 20 That being so it would not be surprising if
expressive gestures in which rubato was a significant component were easily memorised
and reliably reproduced over long periods of time.

Tempo mapping

¶36 We’ve seen several detailed examples in chapter 6 of tempo mapping in practice,
and it’s easy to see from them why tempo rubato is such a powerful means of
expression. There’s been a lot of research on this in recent years, with many studies by
musicologists and psychologists charting tempo change in performances of orchestral
and piano music. 21 It’s well established, therefore, that tempo is worth studying closely.
To date, three main expressive functions of tempo rubato have been investigated: tempo
changes to point up compositional structure; to bring life to a performance; and to
differentiate between more and less intense feeling. Naturally all three are related, but
we’ll look at them in turn.

Figure 18: Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini, Beethoven 3rd

Symphony, 1st movement, recapitulation: tempi

¶37 1) Tempo changes to point up aspects of compositional structure. Nicholas Cook

has looked closely at this in two of Furtwängler’s recordings of Beethoven’s 9th
Symphony (1951 and 1953), comparing them to Schenker’s analytical prescriptions for
performance, and has shown how varied and how subtle are Furtwängler’s responses to
the relative weight of different structural features in the score. 22 By the time these
recordings were made it was already unfashionable to respond in such detail. Toscanini,
whose manner was far more influential on younger conductors, chiming with modernist
preferences, 23 took a more literal approach, but still one that responded carefully to the
main structural divisions. We can see the contrast between Furtwängler’s and
Toscanini’s approaches in recordings of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony made only months
apart in 1952 and 53. Figure 18 maps the chief tempo changes in the exposition of the
first movement, which can be compared to the changes in loudness indicated by the
depth of the waveform. While both conductors use tempo rubato to point up structural
features of the score, it’s very obvious that Furtwängler uses it much more often and
more flexibly, an approach that turns out in retrospect to seem old fashioned simply
because in more recent times conductors have become ever more literal in their
realisation of scores, as José Bowen’s comparative study clearly shows. Bowen
examined a large number of performances of Beethoven’s 5th and found a clear trend
towards slower speeds, despite the first-movement second subject gradually ceasing to
be played slower than the first. 24 We also saw in chapter 6 examples of Fanny Davies
deploying bass anticipations, which are rather complex instances of rubato acting at
different rates in right and left hands. And in the examples of Ilona Eibenschütz and
Alfred Cortot there were many points at which the compositional structure was being
laid out before the listener. It happened much less later in the 20th century, as audiences
were expected to work harder to understand the music by themselves.

¶38 2) Tempo changes to bring life to a performance. In a sense that is exactly what all
these performers were doing; but it happens on every level, not just the structural.
Sounds that are absolutely regularly spaced are not natural: if we hear them in life we
attribute them to machines. Humans, as we shall see when we look at tapping along to
recordings, are not capable of completely accurate timing, and the notion that slight
irregularities in the appearance of things are indications of natural growth is so built-in
to our perception of the world that it’s entirely understandable that we should see them
as beneficial in musical performance. The influence of body respiration and pulse is
obvious. So when we look at a sequence of equally spaced notes and find that they are
not equally spaced at all, we may be seeing evidence of human imperfection, but we are
perceiving humanity made sound and appreciating it. Sound File 32 (wav file) is Benno
Moiseiwitsch’s 1948 recording of Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 28 no. 20. 25 Figure
19 maps the beat lengths. The chords sound even, and yet it’s not dull, and that’s
because (as well as changes in loudness) Moiseiwitsch is lengthening the beats we
expect to be lengthened, 26 especially the third of each bar, and because of the graduated
lengthening of each four-beat group through the first first-bar phrase, gradual enough
that we don’t notice it unless we’re listening very closely indeed. The patterns in the
next four-bar phrase and its repetition are slightly more complex but make sense in
relation to the score. So the performance is far from mechanical, despite its apparent
regularity; in fact, it seems alive. We looked in chapter 6 at examples of Chopin’s
Berceuse, emphasising the vital importance in any performance of using rubato to allow
the ostinato accompaniment to ‘breathe’, and we can see now why that metaphor is
appropriate.

Figure 19: Benno Moiseiwitsch, Chopin, Prelude in C minor, Op. 28 no. 20, bb.
1-12, beat lengths

¶39 3) Tempo changes in order to map intensity of feeling. For equally ‘natural’
reasons, making metaphorical connections between musical sounds and shaped
experiences we know from life, tempo change can very well model changes in intensity
of feeling. An increase in speed in most contexts signals an increase in excitement,
metaphorically linked to faster beating heart, faster breathing, faster locomotion. A
decrease in most contexts will signal the opposite. Similarly, slowing tempo, combined
with other signals, can indicate intensification of painful or loving emotion, modelling
the way our attention and energy is drawn away from anything we may be doing with
our bodies and channelled into the experience of emotion the deeper that is. Elena
Gerhardt’s ‘An die Musik’ at the start of chapter 4 was a very strong example, as her
performance ground almost to a complete standstill at the high-points of phrases and we
understood her to be overwhelmed by the intensity of her feeling about music. We’ve
seen many examples on a much smaller scale, including the subtle rubato of Patti and
Joachim, the more explicitly emotional narratives of Lotte Lehmann, in which tempo
change plays a large part, and the endlessly varying rubato of Cortot. Rereading the
discussion of Cortot’s playing of Chopin’s E-minor prelude, Op. 28 no. 4, from chapter
6 at this point will help to show how effectively finely-calculated tempo change can
effect our perception of music in performance, as well as the extent to which changes in
tempo and changes in loudness are intimately bound up, something worth bearing in
mind whenever one does a study of tempo on its own.

¶40 On other point to bear in mind before we look at how to map tempo change is that it
is the one mode of expressivity that is available to all instrumentalists. In extreme cases,
outstandingly harpsichords and organs, players can do nothing else at all to be musical
than vary the length and onset timing of notes; and so these instruments make especially
good subjects for study if one wants to understand how rubato can work (assuming one
can find a player capable of managing them, easier with harpsichords than organs
because the action is that much more precise). Another very interesting subject, as yet
wholly unstudied, would be the basic form of player piano, in which the notes are
provided by the roll, and the player is left to focus entirely on modulating tempo to
generate expressivity. I offer these as suggestions for readers to pursue.

Mapping tempo
¶41 You can do a certain amount of general work on tempo simply using a metronome.
It’s far from ideal, but if you follow a performance enough times, focussing on one
section at a time and adjusting the metronome’s speed to the tempo at that point, you
can assemble a rough map of tempo change through the main sections of a performance.
Because you need more than a couple of beats to fix the metronome, it’s not going to
show you how tempo shifts from beat to beat. For recording the exact timings between
each pair of beats there are currently two common techniques in use. The first, used in
most published studies by musicologists to date, involves tapping along to the recording
and using a simple computer program to record the time intervals between the taps. The
resulting data can then be converted into a graph whose curves show the extent to which
tempo is speeding up or slowing down through each beat of the score. The main
disadvantage here is that it’s hard to be accurate. To tap exactly on the beat one has to
know in advance when it will come, which means a lot of practice runs. In fact it’s best
to record many runs, at least five, and average the results, not including any runs with
significant errors of which one is aware. Even so, error will arise through mistakes in
anticipation and through slow response time from ear to brain to finger to computer
processor to RAM.

¶42 The second common method is more accurate but more laborious. One takes a
visual representation of the sound file on computer and marks it up at the start of each
beat; then one measures the time between each and notes them down or, if the program
allows it, the computer records them automatically and exports them to a spreadsheet,
where they can be graphed. This way you can be sure that you have the beats in very
nearly the ideal places—very nearly because the point at which a beat is perceived to
begin is not exactly the start of the sound signal for that note, but for almost all
performance analytical purposes this method gives good enough results. This was the
method I used in the graphs provided with chapters 4-6.

¶43 I’ve not given detailed examples of how to use either of these methods because
there is now a better one that combines the two, provided by the freeware program
Sonic Visualiser. (Of course, by the time you read this there may be a better way, in
which case use it!) 27 Nicholas Cook has provided an admirably clear introduction to this
at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/analysing/p9_0_1.html, which it would be impossible to
better, so I suggest that you read it now. The strength of this program is that it enables
you to tap in markers which are added to a visual representation of the sound file (which
may be either a wave form, which shows loudness and timing, or a spectrogram, which
shows frequency as well). Then you can adjust the position of the markers by sight,
checking against the sound as the file plays (slowed down if you like). You can export
the data to a spreadsheet which will graph it automatically, or you can get Sonic
Visualiser to do it and lay the graph on top of the wave-form or spectrogram. This
makes it extremely easy to see exactly how a performer is matching changes in timing,
pitch and loudness and so gives one a very powerful resource for observing and
understanding expressivity in practice.

¶44 Let’s look at an example. I’ll assume that you’ve downloaded Sonic Visualiser
(SV) and have it running on your computer, and that you know how to import audio
sound files. Sound File 33 (wav file) contains the first large phrase of Elena Gerhardt’s
1911 ‘An die Musik’. 28 Open it in SV (File > Import audio file). You’ll see the
recording represented as a waveform. Click on Layer > Add New Time Instants Layer.
Press the Play button and tap the semi-colon key on each beat of the performance.
You’ll find it hard! When you’ve finished, go into SV’s edit mode by clicking on the
crossed arrows symbol on the edit toolbar. Your cursor should become an upwards-
pointing arrow. Then you’ll find that you can use that to move your time-instant marks
back or forward until you’re happy with their position. You can do this by sight, looking
for the loudness peaks at the start of each beat, but you’ll get a more convincing result if
you do it as far as possible by ear, because the loudness peaks don’t always exactly
match the perceived beats. When you play the file again you’ll find your time-instants
sounding as clicks or swishes on top of the music, which makes it slightly easier to
decide when they’re in the right place. (You can turn these off by selecting this layer
with the vertical-lined tab near the top right of your screen and clicking the small green
‘Play’ button near the bottom right.) My guess is that you’ll never be entirely satisfied.

¶45 You can get a much better result, however, if you use a spectrogram display which
shows not only the loudness of each moment but also the frequency of the sounding
notes. That way you can see exactly where each pitch begins. We’re going to use
spectrogram displays more subtly later on in this chapter, but tempo mapping is another
thing you can do with them. So click on Layer > Add Spectrogram. All being well you
should see your beats superimposed on it. Play it to see how this works. You may find it
helpful to adjust the grey dials at the bottom-right of the display in order to get a more
detailed picture. Pull the vertical dial down until the light grey box immediately to its
left is about a quarter to a fifth of the height of the whole grey column; then drag the
lighter box down to the bottom. (You can get the same result by double-clicking on the
dial and then typing in a figure around 4500. All you’re doing is setting the bandwidth
of the visible area of the spectrum.) Pull the horizontal dial rightwards until you have
plenty of horizontal detail, allowing you to see the individual notes easily. (Or double-
click it and enter a value around 50.)

¶46 Now you can see where the piano notes start, and where the vocal notes change.
They’re not always in the same places, and you’ll need to choose exactly where to mark
the onsets of at least some of the beats (‘hol-‘ of ‘holde’ is a particularly difficult one).
Again, try to put the markers where you hear a beat, even if it looks wrong, though you
should find that in this display it mostly looks exactly right. Seeing the notes as
frequencies really does help, because what you’re looking at here is really a kind of
super-score, showing not just the pitches and notional durations but everything that the
performers do in sound. If you can’t be bothered with all this, or are having trouble,
there's one I prepared earlier at Data File 3 (sv file). If you click on the Time Instants
tab near the top right of the screen (tab 2, if you use my file) you should see the beats
marked on a moderately clear spectrogram display—moderately clear given that this is a
very old recording with a lot of surface noise that the machine faithfully records.

¶47 One difference you’ll notice if you open Data File 3 (sv file) and compare it with
yours is that mine has numbered the beats within each bar. You can achieve this as
follows. Select the time instants layer again. Select all the time instants (Edit > Select
All). Then set up the beat counters for four beats in a bar (Edit > Number New Instants
with > Cyclical two-level counter (bar/beat); Cycle size > 4). Finally renumber the beats
(Edit > Renumber Selected Instants). All being well your beats should now be
numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1 etc.

¶48 Now we can make a tempo graph. With the Time Instants layer on top select all the
instants (Edit > Select All), and Copy them; add a Time Values Layer for the graph
(Layer > Add New Time Values Layer), and Paste. In the dialogue box that appears
select ‘Duration since the previous item’. Your tempo graph should appear. (By all
means try the other options in the dialogue box, opening a new time values layer for
each, and see what happens. Choosing ‘Tempo (bpm) based on duration since previous
item’, for example, will give you a graph that goes up to get faster and down to get
slower.) With the new layer selected (tab 4 if you’re using my version) set ‘Plot Type’
to Line or Curve to get a clearer display.

¶49 Use Layer > Add New Text Layer to add in the words at the appropriate places: ‘Du
holde Kunst, in wie viel grauen Stunden’. (If you place them inaccurately you can move
them by using the crossed-arrows edit tool, just as for the time instants.) Or just open
my version at Data File 4 (sv file). If you work your way along the tabs at the top right
you should be able to assemble a composite picture that superimposes a tempo graph on
the waveform, spectrogram, time instants and text. What we’re left with is something
potentially very helpful, a display that shows at a glance exactly how long and how loud
each note is, what its pitch is, and how quickly the tempo is getting faster or slower. Just
about everything we need to know about the sound of Gerhardt’s performance is on
screen, and all we have to do is to start to think about how it relates to the experience of
hearing this performance. 29

¶50 One of the very obvious things we can say is that the rubato relates quite closely to
the words. The main ritardandi happen on key descriptive words: ‘Du holde Kunst (You
lovely art), in wie viel (in how many) grauen Stunden (dark hours)’, and then later on
‘Kreis’ (crisis). Note too the swoops up to ‘holde’ and ‘grauen’, and the way ‘holde’ is
shaped by vibrato getting wider and then narrower again, each component of the sound
giving that moment greater emphasis. Each in fact could be thought of as a separate
expressive gesture, although in practice they combine into one: each brings some
expressive value to the whole. The loudest moments in the extract are in ‘wie’ and
‘mich’, both doing expressive work, the former emphasising just how many dark
moments have been relieved by music, the latter emphasising how personal this all is
(as if we couldn’t tell). Of course the huge extent of the rubato, coupled with the
changes of dynamic and the pitch inflections (vibrato and portamento both varying
expressively), add up to something far more extreme than we could possibly consider
tasteful today, but that’s beside the point. For reasons I outlined in chapter 4, this style
made perfect sense to Gerhardt, and surely to at least some of her listeners, as the most
intense expression of her love of music that she could communicate. And now it’s easy
to see the elements that combine to generate it.

¶51 If she worked on this scale—with modifications of parameters from note to note as
relatively large as this—all the time, we might well find her singing impossible. This
has to be accepted as a special case, I think (and one which, as we have seen, she
moderated somewhat in her later, 1924, recording of the piece). Nevertheless, in
studying other recordings by her we can expect to see similar sorts of gestures on a
smaller scale—and indeed, in her 1924 recording (Sound File 31 (wav file) above) that
is exactly what we get: essentially the same gestures, but reduced in length. Their
nature, if not their size, is characteristic of, in fact defines, her personal style, and fits
plausibly within her period. A thorough definition of a personal or period style, then,
could use these sorts of visualisation techniques to analyse its constituent expressive
gestures.
¶52 For contrasting examples of tempo mapping put to use in performance analysis I
refer you back, if I may, to chapter 6 and the discussions of Eibenschütz compared to
Kempff in Brahms Op. 119 no. 2, and of Rubinstein’s and more recent pianists’
recordings of Chopin Op. 17 no. 4. They were produced by a similar process to that
outlined above, though the Eibenschütz/Kempff used PRAAT rather than Sonic
Visualiser. You can find ready-made markup files for a great many recordings of
Chopin mazurkas within the CHARM website:
http://www.mazurka.org.uk/ana/markup/. Select any highlighted recording and you’ll be
taken to details of the markup files available. Provided that you have a copy of that
recording you’ll be able to import both the recording and the markup into Sonic
Visualiser or the freeware sound editor Audacity and use them for performance analysis
of your own. Or of course you can start from the beginning, using the procedure
illustrated by the Gerhardt ‘An die Musik’ extract and make your own markups on any
recordings you may wish to study.

¶53 It’s tempo graphs like these that Craig Sapp has used to generate the graphic
comparisons of performances mentioned in chapter 6 when we were looking at the
Rubinstein examples. Sapp used a mathematical technique designed for comparing
curves in order to compare the graphs of pairs of performances of Op. 17 no. 4. You’ll
find examples at http://mazurka.org.uk/ana/hicor/ together with explanation of how they
work. The Rubinstein comparisons are particularly interesting because of the clarity
with which they show just how alike his 1938 and 1961 performances are. Yet to us, as
listeners, they seem distinct, each fitting well within its surrounding period style. The
later performance seems (and indeed the tempo graphs confirm this) to use narrower
rubato, in keeping with the practice of other pianists active in the 1960s, while the
earlier fits well within the habitual style of players in the 1930s. So how is it that Sapp’s
maps correlating tempo curves look so similar? Presumably what have remained
constant are the places where Rubinstein places rubato, and the extent of it at each spot
relative to the overall range of tempo change (which is narrower in 1961). It’s also
likely that listeners’ impressions will be affected by the relationship between rubato and
changes in loudness which these images do not map. That too is probably contributing
to our sense that these performances belong to different stylistic worlds. It’s an example
that can tell us quite a lot about how style change works and about how performers
develop. Not many change as much as Rubinstein, but even when they do their personal
styles, as fingerprinted in these analyses, are still sufficiently constant to differentiate
them clearly from anyone else.

¶54 Another thing these images show is the relative uselessness of a measure of average
tempo over a whole composition. Not only do all performances look alike when one
reduces them to a single measure (the tips of Sapp’s triangles), but one is ceasing to
look at them at a level that has anything to do with the way we perceive music. There
are questions that are worth asking about these more general levels, especially about the
way speeds have changed over the last hundred years, which is what Bowen showed so
clearly for Beethoven’s 5th symphony. 30 But on the whole the most fruitful levels for
investigation are sufficiently near the surface of a performance (and a composition) to
be perceptible with close listening. Sapp’s analyses are particularly interesting because
they show all levels: one can read the detail near the bottom and the generality towards
the top. (Schenkerians will see the value of that at once.) They suggest just how much
there is to be learnt from imaginative visual mapping of performance data taken from
recordings. There is surely, in techniques of data analysis like this, huge potential for a
new generation of scholars wanting to discover more about how music in performance
works.

¶55 A final point before we move on to analyse expressive gestures, a point I’ve hinted
at a couple of times but that needs to be made explicit: in most music-making rubato is
not just a matter of tempo. Rubato works together with changes in dynamics, and the
interrelationship is too complex to be understood as yet (an area that badly needs
sophisticated empirical research). Nothing makes this clearer than the examples
generated by Craig Sapp and Andrew Earis, using software developed by Earis that
extracts the timing information from recordings and applies it to a plain MIDI
performance of the score. 31 By this means it’s possible to hear fine pianists’ rubato
without its associated dynamic changes. Sound File 34 (wav file) allows you to hear the
result, derived from a performance by a very well-known contemporary pianist of
Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 17 no. 4. The result, as you can hear, is musical nonsense: there
seems to be no reason for notes to be as long or as short as they are. The example warns
us that tempo mapping is only part of the story: timing only makes sense in relation to
other parameters, and it’s understanding the interrelationship that is the key to
understanding performance. It offers us the exciting prospect that there is fundamental
research on musical performance waiting to be done.

Spectrographic displays of expressive gestures

¶56 We’re now in a position to focus on the analysis and interpretation of expressive
gestures at a relatively detailed level. I’m interested in what makes individual notes or
small phrases meaningful, expressive of something. For this we’ll need to use the
spectrographic capability of Sonic Visualiser or any other spectrographic software. We
need to begin with some introduction to spectrograms, their capabilities and their
limitations. 32 Then we’ll be in a better position to interpret what we see. 33 I’m going to
start with a very basic description of what you can see in two related examples. 34 If
you’ve seen enough spectrograms to understand this already then skip to the discussion
of the second, which introduces some useful information about the spectra of words.

Plate 10: Heifetz, Schubert, 'Ave Maria' (arr. violin and piano), matrix A21072,
issued on HMV DB 1047 (rec. 1926), 1'04''-1'24''

¶57 Plate 10 is a spectrogram of an extract from Heifetz’s c. 1926 recording of

Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’, arranged by August Wilhelmj for violin and piano. The sound
file is Sound File 35 (wav file). 35 If you have Sonic Visualiser to hand you can load
Data File 5 (sv file) and use that instead of the picture. 36 On the vertical axis is
frequency, indicated by a scale in Hz on the left, and you can see that this picture shows
frequencies between 21Hz and 3400Hz (remember that middle A is at 440Hz); on the
horizontal axis is time (this extract lasts 19 seconds, which will give you an idea of the
scale); loudness is shown as colour, from dark green for the softest, through yellow and
orange, to red for the loudest sounds. What you can see here is a map of all the
frequencies that sound louder than about -50dB. In fact most of the musical sounds
looks like a green snowstorm in the background. Try to ignore that and focus on the
straight and wavy lines in brighter colours. The straight lines nearer the bottom of the
picture are frequencies played by the piano, though the first note of the violin part is
pretty straight too since Heifetz plays it with almost no vibrato. All the wavy lines, of
course, are violin frequencies, wavy because of the vibrato which at its deepest is about
0.75 semitones wide. So although the violin and piano frequencies are displayed
together, the violin vibrato makes it fairly easy to tell which notes are which. The violin
is also much louder most of the time, especially because its notes don’t die away as the
piano’s do, so the violin notes are sounding higher frequencies further up the picture.
The bottom of the picture is fairly confused, which is quite normal because the
fundamentals are relatively close together. We can alter this in SV by selecting ‘log’
instead of ‘linear’: it produces very wide frequency lines at the bottom but at least you
can see more easily where the notes are on the vertical axis. Of course it’s along the
bottom that the fundamentals are shown—apart from artefacts of the recording (which
we have here right along the bottom at 21Hz—ignore those) the fundamentals will
normally be the lowest frequencies present and the ones you perceive as the sounding
pitches. All the rest of the information on the screen is about the colour or timbre of the
sound.

¶58 You should be able to see without too much difficulty that the piano is playing short
chords on fairly even (quaver) beats—look at the 473Hz level—and because the display
is set up to show evenly spaced harmonics, rather than evenly spaced frequencies, you
can see the violin harmonics as evenly spaced wavy lines above, and much more clearly
than the piano harmonics which disappear into the snowstorm much more quickly.
(There are some visible though at about 600Hz and 750Hz.) Heifetz’s vibrato is quite
even, and you can see that the frequencies between about 1500Hz and 2100Hz are
louder than those immediately below and above. This is an important element in
Heifetz’s violin tone in this recording. The fundamental and lower harmonics are
obviously much stronger, giving the sound warmth, but these strong harmonics
relatively low down in the overall spectrum give it a richness without the shrill effect
we’d hear if these stronger harmonics were higher up. The other feature that’s very
obvious is Heifetz’s portamento about three-quarters of the way through the extract.

¶59 Now compare this example with Plate 11. You can find the sound in Sound File 36
(wav file) and the SV setup in Data File 6 (sv file). 37 The SV settings are the same but
the two images are not to the same scale.

Plate 11: McCormack, Schubert, 'Ave Maria' (in English), matrix A49209-1 A,
issued on HMV DB 1297 (rec.1929), 1'07''-1'28''

¶60 This spectrogram shows a performance of the same extract of the same
composition, but now as sung by John McCormack in 1929. 38 What I want to show here
is how the words make a very big difference to the sounding frequencies. McCormack
sings in English, ‘Safe may we sleep beneath thy care, Though banish'd, outcast and
reviled’. His accent is not quite what we’d expect today; my text annotations on my SV
colour of his voice but it’s extremely difficult to work out where that information is,
because most of the patterning in the spectrum of his voice is information about his
pronunciation of the words. Acoustically, vowels and consonants are patterns of relative
loudness of the sounding frequencies across the spectrum. Vowels are made by
changing the shape of one’s vocal cavity, and the effect of that is to change the balance
of harmonics in the sound. That balance will remain the same whatever the pitches one
may be singing and (though to a lesser extent) whatever the tone of one’s voice—to a
lesser extent because the colour of a voice colours the vowels too, making them ‘darker’
or ‘lighter’, and singers can shift vowels around the vocal cavity, making them all
darker or lighter, in order to change listener responses. 39 So the visible information in
this spectrogram is much more informative about the words McCormack is singing than
about the sound of his voice. You can see how similar the spectrum pattern is for the
first two syllables, ‘Safe may’, whose vowels are the same. The same goes for ‘we sleep
be-’, and between ‘ee’ and ‘be’ you can just see the ‘p’ of ‘sleep’ as a vertical line,
indicating the noise element (almost all frequencies sounding for a moment as the lips
are forced apart by air) in ‘puh’.

¶61 You can get a feeling for the way in which changing the balance of frequencies
changes the vowel if you imitate McCormack saying ‘cair’ (of ‘care’) ‘ar’ (of
‘banished’, which he pronounces as something more like ‘barnished’)—’cai ar’—and
feel how close those vowels are in the mouth. You’ll see what changes in the picture as
you move from one to the other: just as the vowel moves back and down in the mouth
so higher harmonics are stronger in ‘air’ and lower harmonics in ‘ar’, and you’ll sense
that as lighter and heavier or brighter and warmer sounds respectively. Similarly if you
compare yourself saying McCormack’s ‘(th)’ough’ and his ‘ou’(t-), you’ll feel the
movement of the vowel up the throat and the widening of your mouth, and it’s easy to
sense how that produces the change in spectrum you can see in the spectrogram: a small
loudening of the harmonics from the third harmonic upwards, producing a slightly
‘brighter’ sound compared to the ‘dull’ ‘warmth’ of ‘ough’. It’s a useful exercise that
sensitises one to the ways in which harmonics colour sounds of all sorts.

Shortcomings of spectrograms

¶62 Now we know something of what we’re looking at in spectrograms it’s important to
know, too, some of the pitfalls in reading them. First, although the computer maps the
loudness of each frequency fairly exactly from the sounds coming off the recording—in
an ideal recording situation showing how loud each sound ‘really’ is in the physical
world—the human ear has varying sensitivity at different frequencies. Any textbook of
basic acoustics will include a chart of frequency curves which shows just how much
louder (in decibels (dB) which measures sound energy) high and especially low sounds
have to be before we perceive them as equal in loudness to sounds in the middle. Our
greatest sensitivity to loudness is in the 1-4kHz range (esp 2-3kHz)—probably evolved
because this range was useful for identifying transient-rich natural sounds, helping our
ancestors identify the sources of sounds in the environment accurately and quickly—but
it now makes us especially sensitive to vowels in speech and tone colour in music.
Nevertheless our ears seem to hear the fundamental most clearly, because it’s not
interfered with by the vibrations of the harmonics to the same extent as the harmonics
are by other harmonics, so it’s easier for our ears to identify with certainty (the nerve
cells in our ears fire without interference from others firing with different frequencies
nearby); but the loudest information is often from the harmonics. If instruments and
voices had their fundamentals much higher up the scale, in the 1-4kHz band, music
would be a lot less colourful. Similarly, the sensitivity to different degrees of loudness
that we need for direction-finding allows us to be aware of this wide range of tone
colours that we don’t otherwise need in an evolutionary sense. So that range between
about 1-4kHz is important for the information it carries about tone, and we perceive it as
louder than the computer does. Consequently a spectrogram doesn’t colour those
frequencies as brightly as it would need to in order to map our perceptions.

¶63 Another thing to bear in mind is that the higher up the spectrum you go the more
the ear integrates tones of similar frequencies into ‘critical bands’, within which we
don’t perceive independent frequencies. For example, 40 a 200Hz frequency’s higher
harmonics at 3000, 3200, 3400Hz all fall within a single critical band (3000-3400) so
for us are integrated, meaning they are not perceptibly different. There’ll be no point,
therefore, in trying to attribute to small details within that critical band any effects we
hear in a performance. On the other hand, the auditory system enhances contrasts
between these critical bands, so some sounds that look similar in a spectrogram may be
perceived as quite strongly contrasting. Moreover, louder frequencies can mask quieter,
so that the latter don’t register with our perception at all. For all these reasons (and
more), what comes into our ears—which is a reproduction of the same signals that the
computer measures—is different in many respects from what we perceive
psychologically. 41

¶64 It’s important, too, to be aware that seeing sounds in a spectrum display encourages
one to hear them. This can be a very good thing, sensitising one to aspects of sound that
one previously ignored. But equally it can lead one to attribute disproportionate
significance to visible details. Not everything one sees on the computer screen is as
audible as it is visible, and (especially in the case of synthetic effects like timbre) vice
versa. So one has to use a spectrogram together with what one hears; it’s not something
to be read but rather to be used as an aid to pinpointing features of which one is vaguely
aware as a listener; it focuses one’s hearing, helps one to identify and understand the
function of the discriminable features of the sound. In this role it’s the most powerful
tool we have.

¶65 Sound File 20 (wav file) is Fanny Davies’s recording of Schumann’s

Davidsbundlertänze, book 2 no. 5, whose triple layering of melodic lines we discussed
in chapter 6. Data File 7 (sv file) is a SV setup which tries to reveal the individual notes
as clearly as possible (given the noisy recording). We can use this now (if we have the
patience) to measure the exact timings and loudnesses of every note. I recommend
playing the SV file a few times to get used to picking out the three layers visually. Then
use the mouse and the readout in the top right-hand corner of the spectrogram to get the
loudness of each note in dB, placing the mouse-tip on the brightest part of the start of
each note. In fact the notes are not strictly layered in loudness nor as evenly played as
you might think listening to the recording, but the loudness of each needs to be
understood together with its timing, which can also effect our sense of its weight, as of
course does the compositional structure which gives notes different perceptual weight in
relation to the surrounding melody and harmony. The bass line is consistently quieter,
but the inner arpeggiated accompaniment is often as loud as the melody: what makes
the melody seem louder is of course its place at the top of the texture and at the start of
many beats, whereas the middle voice tends to be quieter at the beginning of the bar and
then to crescendo as it rises up the scale through the bar. None of this is at all surprising.
¶66 Much more interesting is Davies’s rubato, of which we can get a vivid impression
by using SV’s playback speed control. This is the dial in the bottom right-hand corner.
Double-click on it and enter -130 in the box, which slows the performance substantially,
and listen carefully. According to the score the notes come evenly on successive
quavers. Davies’s second quaver, the first of the inner voice, comes on the fourth (what
would be the fourth if she were playing in time at the speed she takes the inner voice
once it gets going), which establishes an intention to linger at each new minim beat.
After the second melody note she waits an extra quaver before continuing with the inner
voice; later this gap becomes about a quaver and half; and now we can hear much more
easily just how the inner voice waits for melody and bass at the top of the phrase, and
just how much the arpeggiation of the left-hand chords contributes to this miraculously
subtle performance. One could map this out as a tempo graph, but actually in this
instance one learns a lot more simply by listening at a slower speed, focussing the
attention of one’s ears on the placing of the notes one also sees. It’s a powerful aid to
understanding.

¶67 We already discussed Benno Moiseiwitsch’s crescendoing piano notes and now we
can use SV to see how they work. (Sound File 22 (wav file) and Data File 1 (sv file).)
Click on the Select (arrow) tool in the toolbar and move the mouse across the screen
and you’ll see an orange ladder whose rungs mark the expected positions of the
harmonics of the note at the bottom. If you move the ladder over the any of the
crescendoing notes (at ca. 11 secs and 36 secs at 950Hz most obviously, but there are
others) you’ll see that treating those frequencies as the third harmonic above the
fundamental places the fundamental on a moderately strong lower frequency, whose
partials are apparently reinforcing the melody note, causing it to get louder again.
Resonances are being set up which cause the melody string to vibrate more vigorously
for a moment, and they may have partly to do with that particular instrument or even
with the recording room or equipment: it’s interesting that the same B-flat figures twice,
suggesting that one of the elements in the sound reproduction chain is particularly
sensitive to that frequency. So we shouldn’t wax too lyrical about Moiseiwitsch’s skill
in balancing harmonics! Nevertheless, the overlapping of melody notes, hanging onto
the last for some while after playing the next, is very clear from the spectrogram and
gives one some useful insight into his piano technique.

¶68 Turning to string playing, it’s extremely easy to use SV, or any program that gives a
readout of frequency and timing, to measure vibrato and portamento. Sound File 37
(wav file) and Data File 8 (sv file) derive from Albert Sandler’s 1930 HMV recording
of Schubert’s ‘Serenade’, arranged for violin and piano. 42 Using SV and the select tool
choose a long violin note with at least five full vibrato cycles, and choose a harmonic
that gives a large clear display. The vibrato cycles are going to be the same length in
time (they’ll have the same rate) and the same width in pitch (the same extent)
whichever harmonic you take, but if you have a choice use one of the higher harmonics
because the resolution of the spectrogram is better the higher you go. Click on the first
peak and drag the mouse along five peaks (ten is better, but in most pieces not many
notes are that long). Read off the duration of your selection from the numbers at the top
of the selection—it will be around 0.7 secs (the exact length depending on which note
you choose, because Sandler’s vibrato rate varies). Simple mental arithmetic (0.7*2/10)
will tell you that in that case each cycle takes about 0.14 secs, which gives you
Sandler’s vibrato speed at this point (it’s about 7 cycles per second if you prefer
measurement in cps).
¶69 Working out the depth (extent) of vibrato is a little more complicated. First of all,
with the spectrogram tab selected, change ‘Bins’ from ‘All bins’ to ‘Frequencies’. Set to
‘All bins’ you see the frequency range (the width of the bin) that SV has actually
measured; how wide this is depends on your choice of Window size in the box above.
There’s a trade-off between accuracy of timing and frequency, so the larger the window
size you accept the more approximate the timing information but the more precise the
frequency information you’ll get from the display will be. (When you increase the
window size increase the overlap as well to recover some of the timing precision.)
‘Frequencies’ gives you an estimate of the frequency actually present in the bin, which
lies somewhere within the range SV has measured. So setting ‘Bins’ to ‘Frequencies’
gives you a much more precise display of the frequency SV thinks you are hearing.

¶70 Now using the select tool, place the mouse tip at the top of a typically-sized vibrato
cycle. Ideally, get it right on the band of colour representing the frequency; 43 then move
the mouse down to the bottom of the cycle. If you miss, keep the mouse over the box
you’ve drawn and press the delete key. Try again. When you’ve got it right, read off the
interval width in cents displayed beneath the box. (It may be shown only in cents (e.g.
86c) or as a number of semitones (each worth 100 cents) plus or minus a certain number
of cents (e.g. 1-14c): in that case you’ll have to make the addition or subtraction
yourself.) To assess vibrato width properly you need to measure more than one cycle. If
you want an average then you’ll need to measure a great many, because as we’ve seen
vibrato in players born after about 1875 varies according to musical context; but if you
want to examine that variation then a smaller number of readings chosen from the
contrasting passages that interest you will suffice.

¶71 Portamento can be measured using the same tools. Here we’re interested in the
pitch space covered, how long it takes, what shape of curve it is, and how the loudness
changes during it. Working out the properties of the curve is not a trivial task, and for
most purposes may be overkill, 44 but spectrum displays can be very helpful in enabling
one to understand how prominent portamenti seem to be when one listens. Anything
smaller than about 0.03 secs is imperceptible so may as well be ignored except as
evidence of finger technique, like the small slide up to the first violin note in this
Sandler extract. The first real portamento (starting at 13.67 secs) is unmissable at about
0.2 secs long. It’s often impossible to be precise about the length of a portamento slide,
and the slide that starts at around 19.2 secs shows why. The vibrato runs into and out of
the slide: there’s no way to decide, without first conducting a programme of perceptual
experiments, when the rising vibrato cycle at the end of the lower note stops and the
slide begins, or when the slide ends and the new vibrato cycle on the upper note starts. 45
It is pointless to worry about these details at present. Spectrum displays make it all too
easy to indulge in excessive precision which has no perceptual significance. But used
sensibly they can teach us plenty about how devices like portamento work.

¶72 The same techniques could be used to study vibrato and portamento in singing and
wind playing. Here, as also in violin playing, an important feature can be intensity
vibrato, that’s to say, regularly fluctuating loudness as well as or instead of fluctuations
in pitch. For listeners it’s often extremely hard to tell intensity from pitch vibrato, 46 and
measuring intensity vibrato is a little more difficult because you have to take readings in
decibels from several points (and the same points) in each of a representative sample of
cycles. But it is common and needs to be taken into account. 47 An interesting but
challenging example is Germaine Martinelli in Schubert’s ‘Die junge Nonne’, a song of
which we’ll hear more in a moment (Sound File 6a (wav file)and Data File 9 (sv file)).
Using the spectrogram display you can see here how her vibrato is louder at the
extremes of each cycle than between them, and also just how irregular it is in pitch,
especially when she is modelling the young nun’s fear (compare the somewhat more
even ‘Hallelujas’ as the end). Switching in the wave-form display (tab 3 in Data File 9
(sv file)) 48 it becomes extremely easy to see the considerable extent of Martinelli’s
intensity vibrato (look at 8.5 secs, for example); and the passage from 1.04 mins reveals
how that extent tends to increase as she sings higher and louder, even though her pitch
vibrato remains relatively steady.

¶73 Changes in loudness among the harmonics during vibrato produce changes in
timbre or vocal colour. 49 We can study timbre vibrato quite easily using Sonic
Visualiser. In Data File 9 (sv file) the layer tab with the little blue graph icon (probably
tab 4, though SV sometimes reorders them) selects a spectrum analysis. This graphs the
loudness of each frequency across the whole spectrum at the ‘now’ point (i.e. the central
white bar), and as you drag the display across the bar you’ll see the graph change as the
frequencies change their relative loudnesses. Using the note at 1’07” as an example,
drag the display across the bar and you’ll see the heights of the loudest three or four
frequencies (the highest blue steps) alternating as you move through the vibrato cycles.
(There are other changes, clearest below the vocal fundamental, due to the continuing
orchestral accompaniment.) You can find out which harmonics these are by selecting
the ‘Measure’ tool (with the compass icon, at the right-hand end of the Tools toolbar
above the display) and moving the mouse over the tips of the blue spectrum display.
The orange full vertical line marks the fundamental and the short lines the overtones.
You can do the same in the spectrogram layer if you wish. (Switch back to the
‘Navigate’ tool (the hand icon) before going back to the spectrum graph layer,
however.)

¶74 You can produce a more easily readable display, albeit at the expense of obscuring
almost everything else, by changing ‘Plot Type’ from ‘Steps’ to ‘Colours’. Move the
display across the bar again, using the same note at 1’07”, and you’ll see the loudness of
each harmonic indicated by bands of colour. It’s now very easy to see how, as each
pitch/intensity cycle of the vibrato goes by, the colour (=loudness) of the fundamental
and third harmonic alternate in relation to the second. If you want to see this change
while the file plays, you first need to go back to the first tab, with the general settings
for the session, and change ‘Follow Playback’ from ‘Page’ to ‘Scroll’. Now if you
return to the combined spectrogram and spectrum analysis and press ‘Play’, you’ll see
the spectrum analysis changing, mapping the changing timbre, while you follow the
performance. You can use the speed control (bottom right dial, next to the volume
control slider) to slow it down for a better chance to grasp what's going on.

¶75 Having looked at the changing timbre, now we need to use our ears. With the
spectrogram layer on top, move ahead to approx. 1’41” and, using the ‘Select’ icon (the
arrow), select 1’41.3” to 1’42.4”. Press the ‘Constrain playback’ and ‘Loop playback’
icons (immediately to the left of the S-shaped icon). Slow the playback speed to -580%.
Bring up the waveform display so that you can see how the loudness varies regularly
within each vibrato cycle. (It may help to increase the horizontal magnification, using
the horizontal grey dial.) Now press ‘Play’. What you’re hearing, all being well, is a
significant change of timbre from the top to the bottom of each vibrato wave. 50
Although the waveform is telling us that there’s a very large difference in loudness, the
highest point of the vibrato wave much louder than the lowest, we don’t hear it that
way: we hear the timbre changing. And if you switch in the spectrum layer set to ‘Steps’
you’ll see that confirmed: the loudest frequencies are more or less equally loud
throughout the vibrato cycle, but their width changes. There’s a wider frequency band
for each harmonic on the way down the vibrato curve and a narrower (more spiky) band
on the way up, producing a ‘warmer’ (more consonant) sound on the way down and a
‘brighter’ (more focussed) sound on the way up. It’s a very clear example of a timbre
vibrato. The measurable but hardly perceptible intensity vibrato is a simply by-product.

¶76 These effects appear to be, to some extent, dependent on text. With the spectrogram
layer back on top, place the mouse over the vertical blue line that marks the left-hand
selection boundary, and when the cursor becomes a double-ended arrow, click on it and
move it leftwards, back to 1’39.3”. Your selection should now cover 1’39.3” to 1’42.4”.
We now have two notes selected, both on the same pitch. The French text here is ‘[flé-
]tri-e’, and so the vowel changes. 51 It’s the ‘e’ vowel that we’ve been listening to and
that produced such a marked timbre vibrato, whereas the ‘i’ is much more confused, the
loudness of the harmonics in constant irregular flux. We can see that with different
vowels the harmonics interact quite differently, with consequences for timbre, at least in
Martinelli’s voice, that go well beyond the simple fact of the vowel having different
loudnesses for each harmonic. Using the tools provided by Sonic Visualiser we can
make a useful start at analysing these kinds of details.

¶77 Pitch, loudness and timbre may all be cycling in vibrato, therefore, and in highly
complex ways; and it seems probable that this causes the effect identified by Metfessel
(1932) as ‘a halo of tone colouring’ or ‘sonance’, enriching the perceived tone of the
perceived note. 52 To make matters yet more complex, Metfessel finds that the shape of
the vibrato cycle differs between singers—a phenomenon I’ve not attempted to study
here but that needs much more research. 53 All this suggests that vibrato is a far more
complex phenomenon, with more ramifications for the effect of a performance on the
listener (including the effects we perceive as expressive), than we have yet understood.
There is a lot of very fascinating work to be done.

8.3. Sounds from speech, sounds from life

¶78 With singing there is inevitably much to be observed about the treatment of the text.
Let’s begin by looking at signs of deep emotion in early 20th-century singing, and two in
particular, the Italian sob and the German swoop. These seem to have much the same
function and it’s not impossible that they are simply equivalents in two different
stylistic languages. In an earlier article I wrote about Caruso’s sob, 54 and we can use SV
to look at another example. (Sound File 38 (wav file) and Data File 10 (sv file).) This
one comes from an irresistibly unlikely source, a 1930s recording by Max Meili of the
late-medieval Italian lauda ‘Gloria in cielo’ issued on the L’Oiseau Lyre ‘Anthologie
Sonore’ label. 55 The first of several sobs comes at 14.7 seconds—according to SV it
lasts 0.13 secs—and a second, more spectacular, at 51 secs, lasting 0.22 secs. If you
select it, without the sounds on either side, and if on the toolbar you click the ‘Constrain
Playback’ and ‘Loop Playback’ buttons and the press ‘Play’ you’ll hear what it is. It’s a
falsetto note approximately an octave above the destination pitch (a little lower in the
first example, higher in the second) and—as you’d expect from falsetto—with only the
lower harmonics sounding. It’s very quick and it curves up and then down, leading
through an imperceptibly fast portamento into the main note. Its expressive effect relies
on its similarity to an involuntary sob in a male: a sharp intake of breath reacting to
sudden emotional stress forces air through the vocal chords without them having time to
vibrate fully—hence the falsetto. It’s this effect that was such a regular feature of Italian
male singing in the early 20th century and still lives on in the opera house in
performances of 19th-century Italian opera. Why Meili thought it suitable in a lauda is
anyone’s guess, but the text is ‘Gloria in cielo e pace in terra. Nat’è il nostro Salvatore’
(Glory in heaven and peace on earth: our saviour is born), so he’s inviting us to be
deeply moved at the thought of the birth of Jesus. More curious still, he was Swiss, from
Winterthur, and studied in Munich. But in any case there’s no doubt about what this sob
means, nor about how it means it. Analysis of the sound provides a clear explanation for
the effect we perceive. It’s an emotional signal applied to the start of a note whose text
carries special significance, used at a point in the composition where it can be achieved
relatively naturally.

¶79 Similarly the German swoop, which is much more common and obvious in female
than in male singers, leads into a note, usually setting text with special emotional value,
and at places where the composition allows it. So their function and placing are similar,
even though national style and gender are not. Again, swoops can be so fast that one
perceives them as emphasis of some sort rather than as slides up to a note, although
that’s what they are. We’ve mentioned them already in discussing Lotte Lehmann’s
style, where they are much used as signals of deeper feeling, and in Schwarzkopf where
I suggested that they had, in a different and more detached expressive environment,
become signals of irony. And most recently we saw striking examples in Gerhardt’s
singing of ‘An die Musik’ where they clearly signalled strong feeling tied to descriptive
words.

¶80 For a detailed example Let’s look at an extract from Lotte Lehmann’s 1941
recording of Schubert’s ‘Die junge Nonne’. (Sound File 39 (wav file) and Data File 11
(sv file)) 56 This is a transfer from a noisy original but one can still get a good enough
spectrum display out of it to be useful. 57 A casual listen suggests that Lehmann is
emphasising several of these notes, especially at ‘finster’ (dark), ‘Nacht’ (night) and
‘Grab’ (grave). It’s a Gothic-horror text in which the young nun of the title sings of the
storminess of her previous life which she’s leaving behind for the peace of the convent
and marriage to God. But Schubert’s music strongly suggests that her dark past is still
very much with her, 58 so Lehmann is making the most of something that’s very clearly
implied in the composition. A closer listen suggests that at least some of these notes are
swooped up to from below, and that that is what gives them emphasis; and indeed if we
look at the spectrogram we see that almost all are. The following table shows by
roughly how much. (You get different results, incidentally, depending on how you set
the Bins option: slides register as shorter the more precise the setting; for the readings
below I’ve used Peak Bins.)

Approx. length (secs) 0.2 0.16 0.15 0 0.2

Approx. interval -9th +6th 4th 0 -3rd
Text und fin- -ster die Nacht

¶81 So these swoops at first get smaller and shorter. ‘Die’ (the) has none, since the word
has no expressive content. But ‘Nacht’ (night) is stretched out, which compensates for
incidentally, is probably emphasised because it starts the phrase, and this whole phrase
Lehmann intends to be intensely eerie. Another thing this example shows is that you can
swoop up to repeated pitches, and singers often do so in order to give emphasis where
the composition doesn’t help. Here the monotone has its own expressive value, which
Lehmann aims to enhance. The next phrase repeats the first a semitone lower and shows
a similar pattern of swoops.

Approx. length (secs) 0.2 0.16 0.17 0 0.2

Approx. interval +7th -6th +2nd 0 +2nd
Text und fin- -ster die Nacht

¶82 And then the chilling conclusion, with the swoops drawn out into a glissando up to
‘Grab’:

Approx. length (secs) 0.26 0.19 0.5

Approx. interval 5th aug.4th -6th
Text wie das Grab

¶83 What does all this signal? It’s possible that swoops make metaphorical connections
with the same indrawn breath modelled by sobs, or some other index of shock and fear,
providing what I’ve called the Gothic-horror element in this performance. An
intermediate, or at any rate a very closely related source is to be found in speech. We
compared examples of Lehmann reading and singing in chapter 4 (Sound Files 16 (wav
file) and 17 (wav file)) and they illustrate a connection we can see again and again in
expressive singing between song and speech. Expressive sounds from speech are taken
into song, bringing with them the same expressive value. Or perhaps it’s not so much
that song borrows from speech as that both draw on sounds with associations that may
well pre-date speech, vocal responses of humans to deep emotion. 59

¶84 I’ve provided a lot of examples of speech-associated gestures in an article on

‘Expressive Gestures in Schubert Singing on Record’, using extracts from recordings of
‘Die junge Nonne’ and other Schubert songs from across the 20th century. 60 The
following extracts are quoted here (slightly shortened and now with sound clips)
because they provide a range of examples onto which we can add in order to start to
assemble a list of types of analogue between musical performance gestures and sounds
from life. In that article I showed a modern singer, Kathleen Battle, using the vocal
signals of various states of mind to signal emotional states in Schubert songs , beginning
with ‘Die Männer sind méchant’.

¶85 In the text, by Johann Seidl, a girl tells her mother that she was quite right to
distrust her daughter’s lover; she has just seen him kissing someone else. She begins,
‘You told me so, Mother, He is a tearaway’ (‘Er ist ein Springinsfelt’.) (Sound File 40
(wav file)) 61 Knowing the text, it is fairly easy for most listeners to Battle’s recording to
agree that this passage makes a general impression of disgust, an emotion that
Gabrielsson and Juslin tell us has rarely appeared in empirical studies of musical
emotion, perhaps because it needs more clues than just sound to identify it
unambiguously. 62 Here the text and sound together leave little room for doubt. But what
produces that effect? ‘Er’ starts loud and slightly sharp (suggesting a shrill manner of
speech). ‘Er’ is connected by a portamento slur to ‘ist’, so ‘Er’ seems hissed by
association (Errissst). ‘Ist’ is dead straight, the pitch sounds for less than a third of
length of the beat, the rest is ‘sss’. The sharp ‘t’ of ‘ist’ is attached to ‘ein’ and gives
‘ein’ some bite, which it couldn’t otherwise have; and Battle also gives it a nasal tone
and a very fast upper mordent (‘e/\in’). ‘Sh’ (of ‘Springinsfelt’) is all higher frequency
and starts early, exploding into a loud ‘pring’ which starts straight, then slides in a
continuous portamento down through ‘ins’ to ‘feld’. And there’s a hairpin crescendo-
diminuendo through ‘insfeld’, giving a thrown-away end to the word that perhaps
suggests dismissal.

¶86 These are all expressive gestures, evoking sounds from life. Some are
onomatopoeic, the ‘isssst’ which we’ve learned to associate with hate and in particular,
a threatening hate that could lead at any moment to violence. Then there are the sudden
explosive consonants, ‘T-ein’ and ‘shPRing’, evoking the sound of sudden violence.
And the rapid diminuendo at the end of a phrase that evokes a dismissive turning away.

¶87 Many kinds of gestures in song come direct from speech. The meaning of a sound
gesture in speech is transferred to singing by converting the speech gesture into
something with a more precise pitch and duration determined by the requirements of the
musical context. Often the speech gesture invoked is determined by the text, but by no
means always. There’s an example in Battle’s recording of Schubert’s ‘Rastlose Liebe’
(Sound File 41 (wav file)) 63 where she sings ‘Ohne Rast und Ruh’ (without peace or
rest). In Battle’s wildly restless performance ‘ohne’ is the word given the largest gesture
in the phrase, not because it is the most important word but because Schubert’s setting
puts it in the most expressive place, and the singer can get the strongest effect by
working with that. This emphasises that gestures borrowed from speech don’t
necessarily have to arise from the text in order to work; their expressive content in
speech may be taken over and applied in music, either because their emotional content
works effectively in a musical context or simply because the sound seems right.
(Clearly this has implications for our understanding of expressivity in instrumental
music, to which I shall return below.)

¶88 What about the general character of Battle’s voice in this performance? This is not
how Battle normally sounds in Lieder. A more typical extract, which conveniently
includes both her lyrical and her characteristic clipped styles would be ‘Lachen und
Weinen’. (Sound File 42 (wav file).) 64 So what’s different about ‘Rastlose Liebe’? In
‘Rastlose Liebe’ Battle doesn’t just make ‘Ohne Rast’ a continuous portamento—we
can hear that—she also changes her vibrato, speeding it up by around 10% from her
usual rate (which is very roughly 135ms per cycle as opposed to 150 here) and reducing
its width by around 30%. The effect is that she sounds terrified. This is a neat example
because it shows so clearly how effects that we all recognise immediately as signs of
terror—racing heart, tremor in one’s voice—can be reproduced analogously, indeed
almost literally, in singing, and they inevitably cause us to share [or at least to
recognise—more about this distinction below] some of the feelings that would normally
evoke them. There’s lots of research along these lines. The motor theory of speech
perception, 65 Juslin’s functionalist perspective, 66 Sloboda’s dynamic awareness , 67
Cox’s mimetic hypothesis, 68 Watt & Ash’s hypothesis that the action of music is to
mimic a person, 69 and indeed, Peter Kivy’s contour theory, 70 further developed by
Stephen Davies: 71 are all describing this phenomenon, and it seems evident that this is a
fundamental key to understanding musical communication. We read sounds through
what our bodies would do to make them. The truth of that is particularly clear in this
example, because the causes and effects are so obvious and easy to identify. But the
same process is likely to be working in much less obvious cases as well.

¶89 My next few examples all come from Schubert’s ‘Die junge Nonne’, whose
psychological portrait of a disturbed young woman offers us the chance to study the
vocal representation of fear in more detail.

Wie braust durch die Wipfel der heulende How the howling storm roars through the
Sturm! tree-tops!
Es klirren die Balken, es zittert das Haus! The beams are rattling, the house shaking,
Es rollet der Donner, es leuchtet der Blitz! The thunder rolling, the lightning flashing,
Und finster die Nacht, wie das Grab! And dark is the night, as the grave!

¶90 Meta Seinemeyer, in a recording from 1928 (Sound File 43 (wav file)), 72 contrasts
the opening phrases, in which key words (Wipfel, Balken, Donner) are hit hard through
initial consonants sung at full amplitude, with the softer-edged ‘Und finster die Nacht’,
whose sounds crescendo up to their full strength (which is less than for the hard notes).
She also slows down for them, but that’s less crucial. The speech analogy is obvious:
spitting-out sounds evoke anger in speech and by analogy the fury of the storm;
crescendoing sounds evoke something more complex, since there are a number of
situations in which we might crescendo through a sound in speech. Mystery tinged with
fear might be one, and is perhaps what is evoked here. But one can also think of the
contrast between hitting and stroking or pushing. Thinking visually one would call on
hard edges contrasted with blurred. All these are obvious equivalents using different
senses, equating to the perception of this passage of sound. To pin a precise meaning
onto these sounds at ‘finster die Nacht’ would be silly, because it would be to attempt to
make precise something that is by its very nature not precise. That is the point of the
gesture, that it evokes unease, which by definition cannot be precisely explained: its
precise meaning is imprecision. But my methodological point is that once one
understands what’s going on in the sound it’s not hard to see what it means.

¶91 Kathleen Battle in the same passage offers us several details that suggest fear
through loss of control. In ‘zittert das Haus’ (Sound File 44 (wav file)) 73 Battle sings
‘das’ on a different note entirely from Schubert’s, and not a scale note: it’s 650Hz
instead of 550 (c''#), about a tone and a quarter above pitch. Then at ‘finster die Nacht’
(Sound File 45 (wav file)) 74 the slides up to ‘finster’ and ‘Nacht’ are obvious enough to
the ear; a little more subtle—and this is another case where a visual display can help—is
the shallow but longish slide up to ‘wie’ and ‘Grab’, and the combination of that on
‘Grab’ with increasing vibrato and crescendo/diminuendo. These are not characteristic
of Battle’s normal style: in fact she’s extraordinary among female singers of her
generation for her ability to start a note with all the amplitude and vibrato it’s ever
going to have, and for keeping them both absolutely regular throughout a note; it’s an
exceptionally regular voice, and so these small changes have much more significance
for her than they would in others’ performances. One has to read gestures in relation to
their local context, in other words, not off some kind of translation table that attaches
specific meanings to specific sounds (heaven forbid). Just as interesting is ‘das’ which
becomes something more like ‘dash’ as she moves her tongue back from the ‘s’ position
to ‘sh’ so that not only are the vowels the same, ‘das Grab’, but so are the consonant
positions for ‘sh’ and ‘gr’. An unnatural but eerie frozen effect is produced by unnatural
‘s’ sound and the unchanging mouth positions, as if the body were frozen into
immobility with terror.

8.4. Music can model...

¶92 We’ve seen here a number of different types of reference from musical sounds to
sounds from life. In ‘Die Männer sind méchant’ we heard the voice copying the sounds
of anger, that is to say making in singing the same kinds of noises one would make in
speech, the most direct translation possible from one to the other. In the hissing we
heard sounds that signal imminent violence, reminding us perhaps of sounds of anger in
animals (geese, snakes) used also by humans as a conventional signal for dislike. In
‘Rastlöse Liebe’ and in ‘Die junge Nonne’ we heard the voice taking on the effects of
fear on the human voice; knowing how that feels ourselves we recognise what is being
signalled. In Seinemeyer’s performance we heard notes attacked with sound shapes that
depict behaviour (violence in the storm) and images linked to emotion (the darkness of
the night). These are all different kinds of reference, but all things that musical sounds
are able to model.

¶93 As a way of understanding this let’s make a hypothesis and then test it with further
examples. Music is able to depict anything that changes shape over time. According to
this hypothesis music ought to be able to model emotions, and therefore to refer to
anything that generates an emotional response, because feelings involve a sensation,
caused by chemical processes in the brain, that may hit us hard (an onrush) or grow
more slowly, that may overwhelm us or simply make us feel uneasy, and that may
disappear quite suddenly or very gradually; in other words there are a great many shapes
that emotional experiences can have, and they are made over time, so music models
them very well. 75 Similarly music ought to be able to model motion in space, for
example human or animal locomotion, especially if has some irregularity in it so that
it’s not so even as to be characterless. Music ought to be able to model processes in the
natural world that involve distinct shape and motion, storms, earthquakes, streams,
leaves in the breeze, the sea. It ought to be able to model anything that involves sound,
obviously, including the voice, habits of speech and any kind of vocal signal. It ought to
have the greatest difficulty, if it can do it at all, in modelling anything that is
unchanging, for example a road, a house, and static features of the natural world
including the landscape: it’s interesting to see composers and performers trying to get
around that by modelling instead characteristics of people that seem landscape like; for
example mountains become nobility which becomes large slow-moving sounds. 76 But
on the whole this hypothesis seems on the face of it to be plausible. To test it a little
let’s look at some more examples from singing.

¶94 Susan Metcalfe-Casals’s recording of ‘Die junge Nonne’ (Sound File 46) (wav file)
77
includes unusually short and hard-hit notes for ‘Blitz’ (lightning), which models its
speed, suddenness and brightness (vision and motion). Her enormous swoops up to
‘Grab’ perhaps evoke vocal sounds of emotional shock (spontaneous emotional
expressions). Her sudden softening and diminuendo on ‘Heiland’ (saviour) is a cultural
reference (we’ve learned about God) drawing on speech expressions of awe and love
(modelling emotion), as is her narrowing of spectrum and of vibrato to make a choir
voice for ‘Alleluia’. Her curious singing of ‘Und finster’ as ‘Und-er finster’ seems to
broaden and darken her voice, metaphorically mapping darkness between the spectra of
sound and vision. Is this a shape changing over time, though, or is it a connection that
the brain can make for other reasons? I don’t understand this particular example well
enough to be sure, but I think we must in any case allow in our hypothesis for the
brain’s ability to recognise similarities across domains, and especially between sound
and vision. The notions of dark and bright seem to map very easily between sound (dark
= low harmonics, bright = high) to vision (low intensity and high intensity light), and
this seems to have nothing much to do with motion over time, other than at an
immensely fast level of which we could never be aware.

¶95 So let’s expand our hypothesis. Music is able to depict anything that changes shape
over time, or that is perceived through sensations of relative distance, height or
brightness. This would include music’s evident ability to model vertical position in
space through pitch height, distance via loudness, and anything that is characterised
particularly by its reflection of light (shining swords, dark nights). This is still a
cautious hypothesis. A recent study by Zohar Eitan and Renee Timmers, 78 showed that
although different cultures express what in the West we think of as pitch ‘height’ in
many different ways, including ‘size, brightness, angularity, mood, age, and social
status’, subjects nevertheless had no difficulty in deciding correctly which indicated (in
western terms) ‘high’ and ‘low’. Music, then, can probably suggest all these
characteristics, and no doubt others, clearly enough that the signal is not significantly
distorted by cultural assumptions.

¶96 Without a doubt the most extraordinary recording of ‘Die junge Nonne’ is Lula
Mysz-Gmeiner’s from 1928 (Sound File 47) (wav file). 79 Uniquely among the 78rpm
recordings it is spread over two sides because it is much slower than any other. Among
its evocative expressive gestures is a drawn-out transition between ‘das’ and ‘Grab’
almost identical to Battle’s, and a plain uninflected ‘Grab’ that suggests the deadness of
the grave, a translation of lifeless immobility from vision to sound and incidentally an
effect that Elly Ameling also chooses half a century later. What this adds up to is a
reading of this song quite different from any other. For the others the narrative is to be
read literally: the girl joins a convent and becomes a metaphorical bride of Christ. For
Mysz-Gmeiner this is all metaphor. What the girl leaves behind is not just her past life
but life itself; she longs only to meet Christ through death. The ritardandos and
diminuendos which shape so many words are the effort of a dying girl to speak at all;
‘so tobt' es auch jüngst noch in mir’ (so also [a storm raged] not long since in me) uses
the narrow pitch band and falling cadence we use in speech for wistful regret; the
trembling monotone at ‘und finster die Brust wie das Grab’ (and my heart is dark as the
grave) brings to those words her fear of death (death in the monotone, fear in the
trembling). The ‘Alleluja’s, where the music almost stops entirely, are her last words.
This is fascinating as a compendium of evocations of death in singing, but still more so
for its demonstration of just how much the meaning of a composition can be
transformed by a performance, through the signification of the expressive gestures that
the performer deploys.

¶97 Once again we can make our hypothesis more explicit by saying that music is able
to depict anything that typically causes a change in the sounds we make. This includes
mental and physical states that change the sound of our voice, such as illness,
excitement, depression, love, joy, dislike, fear, questioning or enticing another, and so
on. The range is as vast as our powers of vocal expression.

¶98 As an example of a single performance moving through a sequence of images

vividly evoked a striking example is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau ’s 1951 recording of ‘Das
Fischermädchen’. 80 As one of the lightest of Schubert’s last songs it may not seem a
promising candidate, but Fischer-Dieskau, as was suggested in chapter 4, has an
exceptional ability to generate evocative gestures in sound, and since we’ve considered
his voice and his influence in some detail there it seems worth looking closely at one
example where we can see his mastery of subtle changes of sound and mood from word
to word. I’ve arranged the most striking gestures in a table and invite readers to listen to
the song reading the table. The complete text first:

Du schönes Fischermädchen, You beautiful fishermaiden,

Treibe den Kahn ans Land; Row your boat to the shore;
Komm zu mir und setze dich nieder, Come to me and sit you down,
Wir kosen Hand in Hand. We’ll cuddle, hand in hand.

Leg an mein Herz dein Köpfchen Lay on my heart your little head,
Und fürchte dich nicht zu sehr; And fear you not too much;
Vertraust du dich doch sorglos After all, you trust yourself, carefree,
Täglich dem wilden Meer. Daily to the wild sea.

Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere, My heart is just as the sea,
Hat Sturm und Ebb' und Flut, It has storm and ebb and flow,
Und manche schöne Perle And many beautiful pearls
In seiner Tiefe ruht. Rest in its depths.

¶99 Now play Sound File 48 (wav file) 81 against the following table of vocal effects:

You beautiful
Du schönes Fischermädchen,
fishermaiden,
cresc-dim, vibrato
schönes surge of tender feeling
increase

Pull your boat toward

Treibe den Kahn ans Land ;
shore;
ans Land cresc, slowing vibrato welcoming?

Komm zu mir und setze dich

Come to me and sit down,
nieder ,
zu mir cresc-dim personal engagement
unthreatening personal
dich nieder ‘nieder’ slightly louder
engagement

We will speak of love,

Wir kosen Hand in Hand .
hand in hand.
Hand in Hand, 1st time large crescendo emotional frisson
Hand in Hand, 2nd time diminuendo simple non-threatening

Lay your little head on my

Leg an mein Herz dein Köpfchen
heart,
 cresc-dim, portamento on
an mein Herz deeply felt
‘Herz’
Köpfchen pitch inflection on ‘-chen’ affectionate/parental

And do not be too

Und fürchte dich nicht zu sehr ;
frightened;
shortened, small pitch
fürchte dich nicht playful
inflections
zu sehr cresc and swoop ironic, patronising

Indeed, you trust yourself

Vertraust du dich doch sorglos
fearlessly
louder, strong upper
Vertraust...Meer light manly, fearless
harmonics
dich cresc speech emphasis
sorglos loud and steady brave

Täglich dem wilden Meer. Mein Daily to the wild sea! My

Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere , heart is just like the sea,
Mein Herz...Flut stronger lower harmonics warm, intimate, personal
Meere dim, portamento fluctuating

Having storms and ebb

Hat Sturm und Ebb' und Flut,
and flow,
Sturm pitch wobble disturbed

Und manche schöne Perle And many beautiful pearls

more evenly balance
und manche...Perle lighter, brighter
harmonics
schöne, 2nd time cresc, pitch slide on ‘schö’ emotion
regular vibrato, steady
Perle, 2nd time purity
loudness and pitch

In seiner Tiefe ruht . Rest in its depths.

ruht, last time slower, portamento seductive

¶100 The evoked emotions suggested in the third column may be hopelessly over-
simplified or over-interpreted, 82 but the effects in the middle column are not and they
show just how much of Fischer-Dieskau’s attention is given to responding to any words
with expressive potential in the text. As Walter Legge realised when accusing Fischer-
Dieskau of singing through speech, 83 these gestures are very largely drawing on speech
inflections, and that has to be seen as a consistent feature of his personal style. It’s not
surprising, of course, that singers should be so concerned to bring expressivity from
speech into singing. Speech allows much more expression than singing does,
activity required when one listens closely to music in order to decode sounds shaped in
so many dimensions inevitably means that less attention can be paid to the meaning of
words when they are set to music than when they are read. Speech-led expressive
gestures bring some of that meaning back into the music and intensify our perceptions
of the interaction of words and notes in the composer’s setting. It’s relevant, too, that
speech and music appear to be linked in the brain, to the extent that subjects have
difficulty remembering the words of a song without singing the tune, and find it
surprisingly hard to recognise the identity of a tune when the words have been changed;
84
while victims of strokes and other kinds of brain damage who’ve lost areas of the
brain essential for speech are nevertheless able sing words they can no longer say. 85

¶101 One could multiply examples indefinitely, though one might be hard put to find so
many in a performance by any other singer. But I think these are enough to suggest just
how much music can model by being able to model almost anything that changes over
time. Motional and emotional states are encoded analogically in numerous details of the
sounds that the performer is making. Singers, and at a more abstract level
instrumentalists, use these sounds as ‘signs of emotive actions we recognise from daily
life. This isn’t a separate musical sign-language, in other words, but rather uses the
mind’s naturally selected ability to connect phenomena through common features. It’s a
survival skill that’s become a way of understanding the world. The performer integrates
the music with our emotional lives. And that’s surely one of the most important things
that performers do, and one of the absolutely essential ways in which music works.’ 86
Expressive performance happens to a large extent on the level we’ve been examining
here, where changes are measured in tenths of a second or less: these are the expressive
signals we perceive, with more or less awareness depending on how closely we choose
to listen, and with more or less change to our core affect depending on how closely we
allow ourselves to become involved.

¶102 Research into emotional contagion has much to teach us about this latter process.
Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson argue on the basis of empirical studies that individuals
vary both in their ability to ‘infect others with emotion’ and their susceptibility to
emotional contagion, that’s to say, the ease with which emotional expressions by others
modify their own state of mind. 87 There is every reason to suppose this true also of
musical performers and listeners. It’s quite likely, therefore, that many of my
interpretations of Fischer-Dieskau’s sounds in ‘Das Fischermädchen’, and indeed
elsewhere in this book, seem more or less wrong to you. It would be unwise to expect
agreement on the emotional effects of music. Indeed, I’ve argued here that it’s our
ability to feel quite differently about it that gives it much of its social power. At this
stage of research, then, all we can sensibly aim to achieve is to agree on some general
principles and test them on a lot of specific cases.

8.5. Expressivity and signification in instrumental music

¶103 It seems inevitable that these kinds of processes contribute to the kinds of musical
gestures that composers use. Indeed, rather than see performance gestures as arising out
of the requirements of compositional gestures, I’d be more inclined to suggest that
composition gestures are performance gestures formalised into pitches and durations;
and both have their origins, I suggest, in the ‘emotional shapes’ which underlie so many
of the gestures we’ve been examining. 88 The progression from consonance to
dissonance to consonance, in its process of intensification-relaxation, works in the same
way as a crescendo-decrescendo or a lengthening-shortening or a vibrato widening-
narrowing or pitch raising-lowering, except that in all the performance gestures the
process can be inverted and work just as powerfully if other signals are coherent with
that. So, for example, reducing vibrato for a moment can produce at least as much
intensity as increasing it, or getting quieter as much intensity as getting louder. It
depends on what else is happening and why, which emphasises both that these signals
are always parts of larger collections of signs, not necessarily pointing all in one
direction, and also that performance gestures are more flexible, easier to programme
with different meanings in context, than are compositional gestures whose meanings
tend to be more stable. But all these turn into sound the sense of increasing followed by
decreasing intensity which characterises almost all emotional experiences.

¶104 It’s clear that through this common reference expressive performance gestures and
compositional gestures, signs (whether indexical, iconic or symbolic) and topics, are
closely related. Can we therefore consider them all as functions within a broader
musical semiology? Almost certainly we can, and most of the analyses presented here
could be incorporated into a semiotics of performance, but I don’t intend to do that here,
and am happy to leave others with more investment in semiotic theory to do so. I’ve
tried throughout this book to avoid attaching my observations to theory simply because
I think it’s too soon to direct this rather new subject towards any existing theoretical
model. Better for now to make more observations of practice with a view to deriving
theory from it, than to begin from theoretical approaches designed to deal with
compositions and to squeeze performance practices into their necessarily narrowed
channels of thought. We need to be able to acknowledge and work with the unfixedness
of performance, and we can’t do that with models designed to explain the much more
formalised procedures of composition. It’s also arguable, and I think in due course may
be increasingly argued, that empirical investigations of perception and cognition
undercut theory, so that for example cultural theory may be seen as simply a verbal
reification of cross-domain mapping in the context of a process of Darwinian cultural
evolution, and semiotics an abstraction from it. But many may disagree, and in any case
the subject will go where it’s taken.

¶105 I do think, though, that what we’ve seen in this chapter may suggest that musical
semiotics, in leaving aside performance, has to date been unduly narrowly focussed. In
putting behind us two centuries of writers on musical meaning—including such figures
as CPE Bach, Rousseau, and indeed the much-derided Deryck Cooke, all of whom at
least assumed performance as integral to the realisation of affect—we are, of course,
obeying the demands of a theory-led musicological culture, itself led by more general
scientific-positivist preferences, apparently replacing naive emotional response to
musical signification with a more distanced view of what musical gestures might signal
in a more abstract way. In a score-based culture intensified by decades of score-based
analysis it seems much more natural than it would have in the 18th, 19th or early 20th
centuries to see musical signification as a matter of patterns symbolising various kinds
of order within a functional linguistic system, a structured process which through its
coherence and logic gives satisfaction to the mind. But bringing performance into the
equation disrupts this tidy intellectual world. It’s evident to anyone who listens to music
with any kind of engagement that it is not just a symbolic system that stimulates the
intellect: it also, as people have always recognised, engages with our emotions. And
when we listen to performers, and especially to singers, it’s quite obvious that the kinds
of things they are doing have a direct physical relationship to the kinds of things our
bodies do when they are emotionally engaged. It’s the sounding gesture, not the written
one alone (to conceive of which one has to assume score-reading without imagined
performance), that calls the emotional sub-routine, but call it it does, and we need to
find a way of talking about it once again.

¶106 We are now in a good position, I hope, to address from the perspective of recorded
performance a notoriously hoary issue, namely the kinds of meanings to which
performance gives rise in instrumental music. I suggested at the end of chapter 5 that
performance style in instrumental playing has changed less than singing because of the
necessarily narrower range of possibilities allowed by an artificial instrument, and I
implied also that this was unproblematic in the sense that not having text to set removed
much of the compulsion to illustrate particular notes or progressions with widely
varying expressive gestures. It is absolutely the case, therefore, as commentators have
long supposed, that the performance of instrumental music is more single-mindedly
focussed on pointing up the musical structure than is song. Nevertheless, the starting
point for any consideration of expressive gestures in instrumental performance has to be
this observation, that the treatments of the sound that cause moments in instrumental
playing to seem expressive are exactly the same kinds of treatments that singers use in
texted music. As I’ve just suggested, a sudden crescendo still models a surge of
emotion, deepening vibrato greater intensity of feeling, and so on. The languages of
signification are the same and it would be absurd to suppose that wholly different
mental systems are used when we respond to acoustically related gestures in singing and
in playing. Although instrumentalists are not using speech directly it’s perfectly
possible that they invoke speech gestures as well on occasion. Indeed, we shall see one
in a moment when we look at Alfred Cortot playing ‘Der Dichter spricht’. So we need
to see instrumentalists and singers and listeners all bound up within the same expressive
and interpretative world, ‘speaking’, as it were, the same language, many of whose
words are more innate than learned. 89

¶107 It follows, that most of what has been said about the workings of expressive
gesture in singing is relevant also to playing. That is not to say that we should treat
playing as if it were singing. It would be ridiculous to try to attach specific meanings to
instrumental gestures by reading across from singing, not just because it misses the
whole point of instrumental music as an abstraction from singing, 90 but also because the
unfixedness of performance gesture is at its most effective and fascinating in the
absence of text. There may be exceptions, most obviously in instrumental arrangements
of songs, when performers may well imagine and respond to the words as they play,
especially if those words are well-known. Heifetz’s recording of the Schubert-Wilhelmj
‘Ave Maria’, which we looked at earlier in this chapter, may be such a case. (Sound File
49 (wav file) has the complete recording.) 91 The following table suggests how some of
Heifetz’s gestures may relate to his sense of the words. (Sounds emphasised by Heifetz
are marked in the text in italics, with a joining underline for the portamenti in the
penultimate line.)

Walter Scott: As set by Schubert: Heifetz:

Ave, Maria! Maiden mild! Ave Maria! Jungfrau mild
Oh listen to a maiden's prayer; Erhöre einer Jungfrau Flehen, supplicating
For thou canst hear tho' from the Aus diesem Felsen starr und wild
wild, Soll mein Gebet zu dir hinwehen.
And Thou canst save amid Wir schlafen sicher bis zum rocking triple
despair. Morgen, time
Safe may we sleep beneath thy Ob Menschen noch so grausam pressed marcato
care sind.
Tho' banish'd outcast and reviled, O Jungfrau, sieh der Jungfrau portamento
Oh, Maiden hear a maidens Sorgen,
prayer. O_Mutter, hör ein_bittend Kind!
Oh Mother, hear a suppliant Ave Maria!
child!
Ave Maria!

¶108 I can see no convincing indication of Heifetz treating his second (his last) stanza
as a representation of either of the remaining stanzas of text. 92 Wilhelmj’s double-
stopping in octaves and then in sixths, as realised by Heifetz, 93 seems a wholly musical
decision aimed at increasing intensity towards the end, which only goes to emphasise
that that is what most expressivity in instrumental playing is for, to respond to dramatic
possibilities inherent in the score and in the occasion of its performance.

¶109 Another exception, and rather a large one, concerns accompaniments to song and
aria. Clearly in these cases there are very good reasons why instrumentalists may choose
expressive gestures in the light of specific images. And of course the same goes for all
kinds of programmatic music. The sword motif in Die Walküre, to take but one obvious
example, would be less effective if played without the trumpeter aiming for the
brightest possible sound (strong upper harmonics = bright = glinting = sword). But that
same sound can bring a perceptually significant edge to a trumpet note in an apparently
abstract musical context, and the metaphor will still work, not quite all the way to
‘sword’ but far enough to lend that moment a sense of brilliance as the note ‘cuts
through’ the orchestral texture. All this is obvious and needs no further comment. It
simply confirms that the sound modifications used when thinking beyond music are of
the same types as those that respond only to musical structure. Shaped change in sound
is itself enough to do expressive work, identifiable metaphorical mappings bring added
associations, text pins those down, but neither text nor identifiable metaphor are
necessary for expressivity: change in sound, or in relation to expectation, 94 is all that’s
required. Change works, though, because it represents other kinds of change, the result
(as we’ve seen) of selection for extreme sensitivity to sound change. Even the most
restrained expressive performance affects us because even a small change in the profile
of a sound is sufficient to attract our notice and trigger a search for meaning.

¶110 It follows from the identity of texted and untexted expressive gestures that
listeners can with the greatest ease map across domains from shaped sound to many
other kinds of shaped experience. And it shouldn’t surprise musicians in the least that a
great many listeners do generate images or narratives as they listen to performances of
apparently abstract music. This is a practice that musical training in recent times has
tried hard to eradicate. There’s a strong sense among music educators that musical
experiences arising from appreciation of the functioning of musical structures are more
powerful and in some way more proper than experiences arising from cross-domain
mapping to imaginary stories or scenes. But how can that be known? If brains do it so
easily is it necessarily distracting rather than enhancing? It seems distinctly possible that
academic music has been excluding on principle a large area of sensation. At any rate it
needs rethinking, preferably in the light of new research in music cognition that
explores these kinds of experiences in a great many subjects. Gabrielsson’s work on
‘strong experiences of music’ has made a very important start. 95 It shows as clearly as
anything that experiences of music associated with very specific memories and
imagined scenes can be overwhelmingly powerful for a great many people. 96 Musicians
need to look at this whole issue with more care and more respect.

¶111 Linked to these issues are the effects of music on clients and patients with physical
and mental impairments. Music therapy is a particularly interesting case for us because
of the way in which appropriately shaped performance is improvised in order to interact
communicatively with the moods and gestures of clients, enabling communication
through sound with a specificity and intensity that cannot be achieved at first through
language. 97 Similarly, Alzheimer’s patients played to in a style appropriate to their
changing states, can recover, for as long as the music lasts and for a little time
afterwards, faculties that in every other situation they appear to have lost: memories of
songs and tunes, coordination as they sway and clap in time to the music, concentration,
focussing together on the music, participation, singing and moving together. 98
Instrumental music can achieve far more, then, than simply to stimulate intellectually
sophisticated audiences of musical cognoscenti. But it does it with precisely the effects
that we’ve been looking at throughout this book. Clearly there is a great deal about the
power of absolute music that we’ve not been studying as musicologists but that is
immediately relevant to how music works in us. It would be good to see the study of
performance moving into those areas in the years to come.

¶112 So in assuming that expressivity in music doesn’t have to represent anything at all,
we need to be careful. We may as expert listeners choose to focus our attention on the
relationship between expressive gesture and musical structure, but that’s not to say that
even our educated minds are not also finding references to extra-musical domains. It
may only be our attention to the structure that is masking the results. We certainly do
not ignore them nearly as much as we think. It’s perfectly obvious, for example, that
there is happy music, triumphant music, solemn music, sad music, and so on, and these
analogies are not ignored by any of us. (Imagine hearing the opening of the finale of
Beethoven’s 9th symphony without being aware of a crisis, or the finale of the sixth
Brandenburg without a sense of speed (however slowly it’s played).)

¶113 We need to be cautious, therefore, about assuming that apparently abstract

performances, making only the most restrained use of flexibility in tempo, loudness or
pitch, make no call on metaphorical association. In an important sense, as we’ve seen,
change in sound is itself metaphorical of change in feeling. And this is almost certainly
the reason why performance may be relatively ‘straight’ and still very successful. Think
of pianists from the 50s through the 80s, figures such as Curzon, Kempff, Brendel and
Ashkenazy. Here the implications of the ‘musical argument’ are being realised and
pointed-up far more than they are being expressed emotionally: these pianists are (to
borrow the options outlined in chapter 2) ‘Making audible aspects of the music’s
structure’ much more than ‘Giving it emotional force through expressivity’. The means,
however, are essentially the same as in earlier more expressive performances and as in
vocal performances, raising the possibility that their ultimate (evolutionary) origin may
be in vocal expression of emotional states. Even pointing up musical structure is not
emotionally neutral, as the intensely favourable response to these pianists shows very
well.

¶114 To see metaphor at work in instrumental performance it will, once again, be most
helpful to take a rather gross example to begin with. Film survives of Cortot
demonstrating ‘Der Dichter spricht’ from Schumann’s Kinderscenen in a masterclass in
Paris in 1953. 99

Figure 20: Alfred Cortot, Schumann, 'Der Dichter spricht' (Kinderscenen), with
spoken commentary (1953)

¶115 In Figure 20 Cortot shows the student pianist how he imagines a narrative as he
plays, one in which the poet makes a statement, repeats it, and then (bars 9-12) asks a
question. How is the question asked in sound? Evidently Schumann has done much of
the work already, writing a line with an upward inflection and an unstable harmony at
the end. But the player has to do something too. With questions in speech, the crucial
moment is that final upward inflection. If it’s long, which is what Schumann has
notated, it’s a meditative question, rhetorical, not expecting an immediate answer. To
make the second question tender, as Cortot suggests, one lets the sounds overlap,
running them into each other as in tender speech. Alternatively, if one were to shorten
the final inflection it would become a interrogative: the sense of incompleteness that a
cut-off final sound gives is an essential ingredient in a question that expects an answer.
A little bit long is how Schumann has marked it, so if it’s a question at all for him then
it may be rhetorical or there may be some uncertainty. But that’s a historical matter, not
an interpretative one. If we decide to make it an interrogative we easily can. Either way,
we can then think of the recitative (bar 12) as a process of thought, as the poet considers
his answer. And if we want to, we can use the high G as the moment when his answer
becomes fully formed, and the preceding polyphonic passage as the forming process. In
that case, the G needs to be striking, which can be done by making it longer and also by
lifting the pedal so that the sound clears just as the poet’s mind clears. Sanctioned by
neither Schumann nor Cortot, this is nonetheless a clear example of the way we call on
sounds from life, and on analogies, in order to understand what music means. And it
shows, too, how an instrumentalist can direct that meaning.

¶116 With Cortot, or with performances in that highly expressive tradition, it’s
relatively easy to spot these references. And so listening to him is a relatively lifelike
experience. The music seems to be about more than just sounds because it is. In later
20th-century performance practices it’s lifelike to a much lesser extent, and focuses
much more on structural exegesis. One hears a musical argument more than an
emotional one, but as I’ve explained, that is not to say that no emotional work is being
done. On the contrary, it seems likely that listeners adjust their expectations to the scale
of the performer’s expressive gestures and respond to smaller gestures with appropriate
intensity.

¶117 Artur Schnabel’s 1947 recording of Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’ from Kinderscenen

provides a good early example (Sound File 50 (wav file)), 100 and one we can compare
with Cortot (Sound File 51 (wav file)). 101 Cortot changes speed with bewildering
unpredictability, no doubt modelling the unpredictability of dreaming (the title). In so
far as his performance is structured by the composition it’s by the melodic lines and
fragments he emphasises as they pass by. Schnabel, on the other hand, plays relatively
regularly, with much less rubato—the placing of notes is never surprising—and much
more even dynamics. His performance seems to be shaped by the harmonic weight of
each chord and by the voice-leading that creates it. It’s the music rather than the title
that drives the performance. Within this even flow the changes are smaller but for their
size are more significant than in Cortot. The loudest events in the first phrase are the
chords on the second and fourth beats of bar 3 and the second of bar 4, in other words
the chords that set up and enact the phrase-end cadence. Nothing is as loud again
(though the repeat of those moments comes close) until the harmonic turn through c-
minor and D-major sonorities in bar 10 which generates much of the second half of the
piece. Consistently, Schnabel heads for the harmonic cruxes, both through loudness and
rubato. But the changes that create these moments of focus are smaller than in Cortot’s
or than they would have been in other earlier performance styles. In other words we are
seeing a new interest in regularity, and also in compositional structure as the chief factor
placing emphasis in the sound. For the listener this requires more attention because the
performer is no longer reaching out to grab one’s attention through surprise.

¶118 This Cortot example is extreme, of course, because it’s modelling something
already curious, but it’s just a particularly clear example of the way in which so much
early recorded music-making, especially from the 1920s and 30s, engages the listener
through unpredictability and the inability of the brain to find anything repetitive that it
can cease to attend to. New information is constantly flowing in and demanding new
analysis. Schnabel’s approach to the listener is different, and heralds a new approach to
performance in general. Because much on the surface is regular there is less new
information about timing and loudness to be assimilated and to have a cause assigned
by hearing’s naturally selected responses. If one wants to be moved by the performance
one has to listen more purposefully, engaging cognitive processes that will compare
what is heard with what is known about musical structures and processes. Otherwise
one has simply to let the pretty sounds wash over one and drift away.

¶119 One can see similar tends in singing. Compare for example Janet Baker and Lotte
Lehmann singing Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. 102 For one the lover/wife/widow
is an open book, naïve, passionate and desolate; for the other she is more private,
exploring her feelings discreetly within herself. For one the score is a starting-point for
the recreation of life; for the other a map of a musical work, specifying a journey from
which deviation is out of the question. Vibrato, just as for string players, now does the
much of the work of emotional expression. Pianists continue to work with loudness and
timing, but on a much reduced scale. And so on. This is a very different expressive
world from that of pre-war performance. Thus in Schnabel, and then the new generation
dominating the scene in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, what we’re dealing with for practical
purposes is a grammar of expressivity of structure that, however it may actually be
affecting us through our naturally selected and culturally learned responses to music, we
recognise consciously first of all, if we have the training, in relation to musical structure
and not primarily as representative of anything else.

¶120 Perhaps this helps to explain why music analysis arose at the same time that
instrumental music came to be considered the highest form of musical work, reaching
the apex of its intellectual popularity at the time (the 1970s) of least performance
expressivity. Performance and structure are closer in these kinds of performances, more
completely (though never fully) mapped onto each other, so that performance doesn’t
‘interfere with’ or ‘distract from’ the understanding of structure. Such a view became
endemic to musical academia and still is. It was partly this rather strict musicological
approach in performance, together with frustration at its lack of historical intelligence,
and surely also sheer boredom at is continuingly predictable results, that fired the HIP
movement.

¶121 A final topic that should concern us, in the light of this discussion of what
expressivity in music is for, is the larger question of music’s evolutionary purpose. 103
This is not just a (pre)historical question. We’ve seen how naturally selected responses
to sound still underlie our responses to western art music, overlaid with and shaping
millennia of cultural evolution, because the neural circuits that evolved for this purpose
are still present and are still processing incoming sound. We must suppose, therefore,
that whatever it was that musical ability evolved to enable us to do still plays some part
in our response to music of all sorts. This is an area of intense research at the moment
(almost all of it outside musicology), and a survey of the literature would require a book
in itself. To conclude my discussion of expressive performance I want to focus attention
on just one theme. (Another, runaway sexual selection for acoustic displays, has been
discussed already.) 104

¶122 James Russell, in an article on the psychological construction of emotion,

distinguishes between ‘core affect’ and ‘full-blown emotion’. 105 Core affect is ‘a
neurophysiological state that is consciously accessible as a simple, nonreflective feeling
that is an integral blend of hedonic (pleasure-displeasure) and arousal (sleepy-activated)
values.’[147] Less formally, core affect is a feeling, ‘an assessment of one’s current
condition’, in effect a mood.[148] It is pre-cognitive and lacks as yet any attribution to a
cause: attribution comes through reflection as one searches for reasons underlying a
feeling. ‘Muscle tension and autonomic nervous system changes may, however, be
direct consequences of core affect.’[156] What Russell is describing seems to be the
state, and its consequences, that we experience through unreflective listening to music.
Music generates core affect and that causes physiological and psychological changes in
listeners. An identifiable cause—a narrative such as one finds in a song text or such as
one may invent—is not necessary to generate the feeling, although it may explain it on
subsequent (immediate or later) reflection. Such reflection, relating the core affect to its
apparent causes and to their implications for one, might generate a full-blown emotion,
but in music, and especially in instrumental performance, that is by no means inevitable.
On the contrary, for Russell the evolutionary value of core affect is precisely that it does
not automatically generate full-blown emotion, but rather allows the possibility that by
responding to seeing emotional states operating on others, in life or (in modern times) in
film, or (we might add) in music, and in having one’s core affect changed by that
response (through empathy), one is able to learn safely and without real, undesirable
consequences how situations feel.

¶123 This brings us very close indeed to an essential aspect of one of the leading current
theories of music’s evolutionary value. Most fully worked out by Ian Cross, this argues
that one of music’s most powerful uses is that it allows us to exercise our emotions in a
group situation without damaging consequences. 106 For Cross, music’s defining
peculiarity is that every member of a group can be emotionally affected by it in a
different way without anyone being aware of the differences. Individuals find meanings
in music that seem true for themselves while believing that they are having a powerful
shared experience with others. And this makes music uniquely effective at creating
social cohesion. Indeed it’s impossible to think of anything else that can do this so
safely. In social groups of early hominids, where language and social bonds were not
yet up to overcoming competing self-interests, musical ability, enabling the
strengthening of cooperation and a sense of belonging, would have offered a very
considerable survival premium. And so musical ability was selected for. This function
still applies, of course. Sharing in music-making and hearing still generates social
cohesion, but it works for us too as individuals. Whether in a group or listening alone,
music’s very non-specificity allows us to exercise our emotions without having to
experience them full-on.

¶124 In the light of these approaches it becomes much easier to understand what
musical performance, and especially what instrumental performance, is doing to us. It
allows us to experience a range of feelings that don’t have to be attributed to specific
causes, other than the sounds themselves, but that nevertheless allow us to exercise our
emotions in satisfying ways. Expressive gestures in performance are stimuli to which
we respond in subtle changes of core affect generated by the performer’s view of the
changing musical structure. For performance analysts, then, one task is to show how
gestures in sound alter core affect. Another could be to try to show what kinds of
emotional experiences result from those changes, although the chances of arriving at
attributions on which every listener can agree are not great. Fortunately that is exactly
the point: music is not meant to be specific; its strength is its flexibility, what I’ve called
its unfixedness. And so the most useful task for students of performance may be to
show how these attributions are reached: the process is much more important than the
results for any one individual.

¶125 A basic objection to the idea that we respond to the evocation of an emotion,
rather than to the emotion itself, however, comes from the practical experience of music
therapists who find that music does indeed cause real emotions to be felt by participants.
In fact that is precisely why music therapy works. Through it, music organises emotions
that are otherwise chaotically confused or inaccessible. Why not for the rest of us? It
seems probable that in socialised listeners, used to the idea of sitting still and
responding internally to (classical!) music, the mapping of recognised onto felt emotion
is not always one-to-one. Studies of this are at an early stage, but early experimental
work confirms music lovers’ experience that felt emotions in response to music are
stronger than recognised emotions when pleasurable but weaker, or even opposite, when
not. 107 Through a process yet to be unravelled, we seem to find for negative recognised
emotion a positive response. But it certainly remains salutary to more distanced theories
of musical response that, for listeners not protected by socialised behaviour in emotional
situations, music generates emotional states like nothing else.

¶126 Given the present state of research, we shall have to accept that answers to this
puzzle will come not from intense contemplation of it but rather from studying the brain
functions that coincide with music. Until then, we may have to be content with the
knowledge that mimesis is in process. Musical sounds are like sounds from life and we
recognise the likeness. Even the smallest adjustments of speed or loudness or pitch
interact with the musical structure to being meaning to a performance. They don’t have
to be made on the scale of a Cortot or Lehmann to do expressive work. I hope this will
offer good reason for future work to look more closely at less overtly expressive
performances. Starting with the most obvious performers makes sense in that it allows
us to see most easily what sorts of processes are involved. But in the end it’s the more
typical, in terms of runaway selection the ritualised situations in which performers work
around a mean, that we should hope to come to understand well.

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Footnotes

1.
HMV C 2535, matrix 2B3427-2 (rec. 20 June 1932), c. 1’28”– 1’35” (1’30”–
1’37” in Sound File 26 (wav file)): ‘seest it in the wave of the golden corn’.
Back to context...
2.
Four collections of essays that between them cover most of these topics in music
perception are Wallin, Merker & Brown (2000); Juslin & Sloboda (2001); Peretz
& Zatorre (2003); and ed. Dorothy Miell, Raymond Macdonald & David J.
Hargreaves, Musical Communication (Oxford University Press, 2005). For a
more detailed discussion of the brain's response to these sorts of codes see
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'Listening and responding to the evidence of early
twentieth-century performance', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134,
Special Issue no. 1 (2010), 45-62. Back to context...
3.
When I say ‘over time’ I don’t have any lower limit in mind. A gesture, in my
use of the term, may last a few microseconds or (conceivably, as in the case of a
prolonged ritardando) several minutes, although most examples here could be
measured in tens or hundreds of microseconds (hundredths of a second). Others
may wish to distinguish between effects that are perceived as almost
instantaneous, and see those as accentuation, and effects that last countable
lengths of time, as see only those as gestures. For me, though, that would be to
miss the shaped nature of even the briefest musical events. On gestures
accompanying speech see especially Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture:
how our hands help us think (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003)
and David McNeill, Hand and Mind: what gestures reveal about thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On gestures in dance and music
see Stephen Malloch, ‘Why do we like to dance and sing?’ in ed. Robin Grove,
Catherine Stevens and Shirley McKechnie, Thinking in Four Dimensions:
creativity and cognition in contemporary dance (Melbourne University
Publishing, 2004), 14-28. For a wide range of work with the concept of gesture
in music see ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, Music and Gesture
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and Proceedings of the Second Conference on Music
and Gesture [CD-ROM of abstracts] (Hull: GK Publishing, 2006). I plan to
consider in a separate study the close similarities between my 'expressive
gestures' and Daniel Stern's 'vitality affects' (Daniel Stern, The Present Moment
in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 2004). Back to
context...
4.
Carl Seashore, Psychology of Music (New York: McGraw Hill, 1938; Dover
repr. 1967), 9. See Cook (1990), 157, quoting Pandora Hopkins, on why
'deviation' is completely the wrong notion here; also Clarke (1995), 22-3. Back
to context...
5.
 Clarke (1995), 22, discusses a previous statement of this idea. Even the local
norm is going to be perceived somewhat differently by each listener, of course,
but that does not invalidate its effect for each. Stern (2004) is entirely about the
now moment, and makes much use of music to explain how we perceive it. Back
to context...
6.
There are many good textbooks on acoustics and psycho-acoustics. My main
sources were Handel (1999); and ed. Perry R. Cook, Music, Cognition, and
Computerized Sound: an introduction to psychoacoustics (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1999). See also James Beament, How we Hear Music: the
relationship between music and the hearing mechanism (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2001). On the acoustics of the voice see especially Johan Sundberg, The Science
of the Singing Voice (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), and his
shorter treatment in 'Where does the sound come from?' in ed. John Potter, The
Cambridge Companion to Singing (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231-
247. For a better understanding of the speech components of singing see, for
example, John Clark & Colin Yallop, An Introduction to Phonetics and
Phonology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed. 1995). Back to context...
7.
Music examples and charts showing the harmonic series are easily available. At
the time of writing there is a good description and illustration in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music) (accessed 12 September
2007). Back to context...
8.
Seashore (1938), 251, reports early research suggesting 0.01, but see John
Pierce, ‘Hearing in time and space’, in ed. Perry R. Cook (1999), 89-103 at 95;
and Clarke (1999). Back to context...
9.
Marcella Sembrich (acc. Frank La Forge), extract from Schubert, ‘Wohin?’,
from 'The Record of Singing [I]', EMI RLS 724 (rec. 1908, this LP reissue
1977), record 1, side 1, band 8 (from unpublished matrix no. C 5046, rec.
Camden, USA, 30.9.1908), 0’ 48” – 1’ 0.9”. On Sembrich see Stephen Herx,
‘Marcella Sembrich: a legendary singer’s career rediscovered’, The Record
Collector 44 (1999), 2-38; W.R. Moran, ‘The recordings of Marcella Sembrich’,
The Record Collector 18 (1969), 110-138; and B.E. Steinberg , ‘Marcella
Sembrich’, The Record Collector 4 (1949), 105-8. Back to context...
10.
Nigel Rogers (acc. Richard Burnett), extract from Schubert, ‘Wohin?’, from
Telefunken 6.35 266-1 (issued 1975), record 1, side 1, band 2, 0’ 51” – 1’ 2.75”
Back to context...
11.
Peter Schreier (acc. András Schiff), extract from Schubert, ‘Wohin?’, from
Decca 430 414-2 (rec. 1989, issued 1991), track 2, 0’ 59” – 1’ 13” Back to
context...
12.
Vocalion C 0220, matrix 03545X, rec. 29 May 1924. Back to context...
13.
A cent is 1/100th of an equally-tempered semitone. It’s a useful measure of pitch
not only because it’s an extremely small unit (below the perceptual threshold),
so measurements in cents can be very precise, but also because it remains
 constant across the frequency spectrum, whereas the size of a semitone in cycles
per second (Hertz, or Hz) doubles with every ascending octave. Back to
context...
14.
Interestingly, in the light of his praise for the 1911 performance quoted earlier,
Desmond Shawe-Taylor, one of the most acute critics of early recorded song,
was disappointed in those made with Harold Craxton. ‘I have never been able to
warm greatly to these records. Like the 1925 acoustic HMVs, they belong to a
period when her voice may have been temporarily off colour; they show neither
the youthful vividness of the early series not the assured mastery of the early
electrics.’ Shawe-Taylor (1987), 179. Plack (2008) discusses changes in
Gerhardt’s portamento between earlier and later recordings (p. 109), and rubato
(111-16). Back to context...
15.
HMV: matrix Ak17387e, recorded on 19 Jan 1914, issued on HMV 7-42006;
Columbia: matrix WA6893-1, rec. 1 Feb 1928, issued on Columbia D 1621.
Back to context...
16.
‘Sir George Henschel: complete commercial recordings’, Cheyne Records CHE
44379, issued 2007. Back to context...
17.
Plack finds many similarities, too, between Henschel’s re-recordings, but also
occasional but striking differences. Plack (2008), esp. 137-47. Back to context...
18.
Richard Turner, in ‘Conductors compared: individual interpretation and historic
trends in Brahms’s First Symphony’ (a paper at the 2007 CHARM/RMA annual
conference), showed with statistical evidence derived from tempo tapping, the
exceptional similarity of two recordings by Stokowski made 36 years apart.
Klemperer, on the other hand, in this respect changed his performance a great
deal over three recordings 28 years apart. Back to context...
19.
For evidence that performers can repeat performances see L. Henry Shaffer and
Neil Todd, 'The interpretive component in musical performance', in ed. Alf
Gabrielsson, Action and perception in rhythm and music (Stockholm:
Publications issued by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, no. 55, 1987),
139-52. The Joyce Hatto deception in which recordings by a variety of
pianists, previously issued by other companies, were illegally reissued by
Concert Artists ascribed to the owner's wife, Joyce Hatto was unmasked
because of the statistically impossibly similarity of the performances. See
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/projects/p2_3_2.html. Michael Krausz, in writing
philosophically about interpretation, implicitly uses the similarity of
performances by one artist to argue that interpretation and performance exist on
different levels: ‘different performances may be of a given interpretation’
(Krausz (1993), 75), and ‘Whatever idiosyncrasies there might be between
different actual performances, if conceptions of the work are appreciably
unchanged, they may perform the same interpretation on different occasions’
(76). This is neat, and may be useful if it proves to be the case (as it well may)
that all performances by the same musician are more alike than any performance
by another. As formulated here it also requires an unduly text-based notion of
the identity of the work, but one could perhaps replace that with a notion of the
 coherent identity of the performer and still be able to show that performers do
indeed have their own interpretations in more or less Krausz’s sense. Back to
context...
20.
Daniel Levitin and Perry R. Cook, ‘Memory for musical tempo: additional
evidence that auditory memory is absolute’, Perception and Psychophysics 58
(1996), 927-35. Back to context...
21.
See the valuable introduction and survey in Eric Clarke, ‘Empirical methods in
the study of performance’, in ed. Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook, Empirical
Musicology: aims, methods, prospects (Oxford University Press, 2004), 77-102.
Back to context...
22.
Nicholas Cook, 'The conductor and the theorist: Furtwängler, Schenker and the
first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony', in Rink (1995), 105-25. Back
to context...
23.
Taruskin (1995), 222-6; and 'Resisting the Ninth', 19 th-Century Music 12
(1989), 241-56, repr. in Taruskin (1995), 235-61. Back to context...
24.
Bowen (1999), 424-51, esp. 434-6 & 446-50. Back to context...
25.
Matrix 2EA13523-1, rec. 30 December 1948, issued on HMV C 3908, 1’ 15” –
2’ 38”. This set of all all the Preludes has an intriguing recording history.
Matrices 2EA13517-1 & 18-1 (C 3905), 19-1 & 20-2 (C3906), and 21-1 (C
3907), were all recorded on 29 December 1948, and this single item (23-1 (C
3908)) in its first usable take the following day. But the remaining two sides,
2EA13522-3 (C 3907) & 24-4 (C 3908), were made on 20 September 1949, very
soon before the set was issued. The high take numbers show that either two
waxes were damaged during production or (less likely in view of the very late
date) those two performances were felt to be sub-standard. Back to context...
26.
Repp (1992b), 244, explains why we may not notice this. Back to context...
27.
Much of this book was written using other, now superceded programs.
Following them, Sonic Visualiser has been through numerous versions (mostly
beta) already, and no doubt will have changed in important ways by the time you
read this, so be prepared for the instructions here to be outdated. As Carl
Seashore said of similar work back in 1932, ‘Developments in this field have
come so fast that one of our special joys in the laboratory has been that of
scrapping instruments.’ (ed. Seashore (1932), 7.) Back to context...
28.
Source details as for Sound File 13 (wav file), but with fractionally more noise
reduction. For a more detailed study of Gerhardt's style, including a statistically-
based study of her changing rubato, see Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, 'Performance
style in Elena Gerhardt's Schubert song recordings', Musicae Scientiae
(forthcoming, 2010). Back to context...
29.
When Harold Seashore had explained the notation of his performance graphs—
the precursors of SV displays—in 1936 he advised that, ‘Before going further
 into a study of the vocal performances, the reader is advised to sing the Ave
Maria [Gounod/Bach’s] through several times while scanning the graphic
picture of it. He will quickly grasp the significance of this type of recording and
also will have an experience of literally both hearing and seeing the song.’ (H.
Seashore (1936), 24.) While we enjoy the luxury of being able to listen to an SV
display played back by the computer, I don’t discourage the reader from singing
through ‘An die Musik’ at this point, especially if you attempt to imitate Elena
Gerhardt. It puts things into perspective. Back to context...
30.
Bowen (1999), esp. 449. Back to context...
31.
For more about this research see http://www.mazurka.org.uk/ . Back to context...
32.
For a good introduction to sound analysis for musicologists see Stephen
McAdams, Philippe Depalle & Eric Clarke, 'Analyzing musical sound', in ed.
Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook, Empirical Musicology: aims, methods,
prospects (Oxford University Press, 2004), 157-96. Back to context...
33.
For a different approach to spectrographic analysis, using customised routines in
MATLAB, see Johnson (1999), 69-84. Back to context...
34.
This material was used also in the online SV tutorial at
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/analysing/p9_0_1.html. Back to context...
35.
Matrix A21072, issued on HMV DB 1047 (rec. 1926), 1’ 04” – 1’ 24” Back to
context...
36.
SV 1.2 settings: Threshold 0, Colour Rotation 42, Scale dBV^2, both boxes
unchecked, Gain 4.5dB, Window 2048, 75%, All Bins, Linear; Vertical zoom
5500, Horizontal zoom 44. Back to context...
37.
Matrix A49209-1A, issued on HMV DB 1297 (rec. 1928), 1’ 07” – 1’ 28”. Back
to context...
38.
Philip (1992), 176-8, compares McCormack's and Heifetz's (and others')
portamento in these recordings. On McCormack see Brian Fawcett-Johnston,
‘John Count McCormack’, The Record Collector 29 (1984), 5-68 & 77-107.
Back to context...
39.
See especially Reuven Tsur, What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? (Duke
University Press, 1992), 42-3. Back to context...
40.
From Handel (1999), 70. Back to context...
41.
Handel (1999), 70, 318, 519. For early attempts at generating readout from
records see George Brock-Nannestad, ‘Sound carriers for scientific audio
recording and analysis 1857-1957’, preprint of paper delivered to the Audio
Engineering Society’s 106th convention, 1999 (AES Preprint 4884). Back to
context...
42.
 Matrix WA10984-2 (rec. 16 December 1930), issued on Columbia DB 563.
Back to context...
43.
If you try this with ‘All bins’ then measure from the exact middle of the band of
colour representing the frequency: everything else is an artefact of the way
spectrograms are calculated, not real information about sounding pitch. Back to
context...
44.
Though it seems more than likely that as techniques are developed for this we
shall discover that quite small details of portamento have perceptual relevance.
For an impressive start in this direction see H. Seashore (1936), esp. 57-74. Back
to context...
45.
Harold Seashore (H. Seashore (1936), 60-2) devised a consistent approach to
dealing with this problem, but it remains to be determined how listeners
distinguish (or could distinguish with confidence) between slide and note. Back
to context...
46.
Metfessel (1932), 53-5, showed this in an early experiment. Back to context...
47.
For early studies see Joseph Tiffin, ‘The role of pitch and intensity in the vocal
vibrato of students and artists’, in ed. Seashore (1932), 134-165; ed. Seashore
(1936), 71-5; and H. Seashore (1936), 94-7. Intensity vibrato on the violin is
examined in Arnold M. Small, ‘An objective analysis of artistic violin
performance’, in ed. Seashore (1936), 172-231 at 211-20. Back to context...
48.
Note that in Sonic Visualiser the size of the waveform can be varied with the
vertical grey dial provided that the waveform tab is selected. Back to context...
49.
D.A. Rothschild, ‘The timbre vibrato’, in ed. Seashore (1932), 236-44; Harold
G. Seashore, ‘The hearing of pitch and intensity in vibrato’, in ed. Seashore
(1932), 213-35; ed. Seashore (1936), 76-81. Back to context...
50.
Note that in SV when playback is slowed down a lot, as here, the ‘now’ bar lags
far behind the playback, so ignore it and match what you see to what you hear.
You’ll be able to find your place quite easily at the start and end of each
repeated loop of the extract. Back to context...
51.
As the French text is quite hard to find I give it here from a valuable article by
Xavier Hascher which also includes details of the editions and orchestration:
‘Quand Schubert «entra dans la gloire»: Adolphe Nourrit et les versions
orchestrées de La jeune religieuse et du Roi des Aulnes’, Cahiers Franz
Schubert 17 (October 2000), 30–70: l’Orage grossit et s’avance en grondant /
Les murs ébranlés sont battus par le vent / l’éclair brûle au loin l’horizon
pâlissant / Puis partout l’ombre / et la nuit somber / deuil et terreur / souvenir de
douleur / l’orage ainsi grondait en mon Coeur / l’amour délirant nuit et jour
m’agitait / au son d’une voix tout mon corps frissonnait, / et comme l’éclair un
regard me brûlait / ainsi flétrie / ma triste vie / se consumait / Orage à présent
gronde avec fureur / la paix est rentrée / à jamais dans ce Coeur / la Vierge
vouée / à l’amour du Seigneur / lui donne son âme épurée / qu’embrase de ses
 feux la divine ferveur / j’attends à genoux les promesses du ciel / descends ô
mon sauveur du séjour eternal / et viens m’affranchir des liens de la terre / mais
l’air retentit des chants de la prière / au pied de l’autel fume l’encens / la nef se
remplit de saints accents / célestes concerts, accords puissants / venez ravir mon
âme et soumettre mes sens / Alleluia! Alleluia! Back to context...
52.
Metfessel (1932), 60-2. Back to context...
53.
Metfessel (1932), 112-14. Back to context...
54.
Leech-Wilkinson (2001), 7-8. Back to context...
55.
Matrix AS 2, issued in the USA as L’Oiseau Lyre AS 8, side b (1935). Back to
context...
56.
Lotte Lehmann (acc. Paul Ulanowsky), Schubert, ‘Die junge Nonne’, matrix
XCO 30013-1 (rec. 4 Mar 1941), issued on Columbia 71509-D / Columbia LOX
654, 0’51”–1’12”. Back to context...
57.
US Columbia sides at this time were dubs, hence the poor sound. I discussed this
example (without a sound file) in Leech-Wilkinson (2006a). Back to context...
58.
I discussed this at length in Leech-Wilkinson (2007), though without using the
Lehmann performance as an example. Back to context...
59.
On the common origins of music and speech see especially Steven Mithen, The
Singing Neanderthals: the origins of music, language, mind and body (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), and Steven Brown, ‘The “Musilanguage” model
of music evolution’, in Wallin et al. (2000), 271-300. On the very close
relationship between the vocal and musical expression of emotion see especially
Patrik N. Juslin and Petri Laukka, ‘Communication of emotions in vocal
expression and music performance: different channels, same code?’,
Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003), 770-814. Back to context...
60.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006a). Back to context...
61.
‘Schubert Lieder’, Kathleen Battle and James Levine, DG 419 237-2 (recorded
1985 & 87), track 13, 0’9”–0’17”. © Polydor International GmbH, Hamburg
1988 Back to context...
62.
Gabrielsson & Juslin (2003), 528. Back to context...
63.
Battle & Levine, track 14, 0’13”–0’19”. © Polydor International GmbH,
Hamburg 1988 Back to context...
64.
Battle & Levine, track 11, 0’ 28” – 0’ 38”. © Polydor International GmbH,
Hamburg 1988 Back to context...
65.
Alvin M. Liberman and Ignatius G. Mattingly, 'The motor theory of speech
perception revised', Cognition 21 (1985), 1-36. Back to context...
66.
Juslin (2001). Back to context...
67.
John Sloboda, 'Does music mean anything?', Musicae Scientiae 2 (1998), 21-32;
reprinted in Sloboda, Exploring the Musical Mind: cognition, emotion, ability,
function (Oxford University Press, 2005), 163-72. Back to context...
68.
Arnie Cox, 'The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning', Musicae
Scientiae 5 (2001), 195-212. Back to context...
69.
Watt & Ash (1998). Back to context...
70.
Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: an essay on the musical emotions, including the
complete text of The Corded Shell (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989). Back to context...
71.
Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1994), esp. chapter 5. Back to context...
72.
This transfer is of matrix 2-20726, issued Parlophon P 9662, rec. 24 April 1928.
Transfer © Roger Beardsley 2007. For an appreciation of Seinemeyer’s recorded
output see Vicki Kondelik, ‘Meta Seinemeyer’, The Record Collector 47 (2002),
243-83. Back to context...
73.
Battle & Levine, track 15, 0’35”–0’38”. © Polydor International GmbH,
Hamburg 1988 Back to context...
74.
Battle & Levine, track 15, 0’52”–1’10”. © Polydor International GmbH,
Hamburg 1988 Back to context...
75.
My approach does not depend on the existence of so-called 'basic emotions', (on
which see Andrew Ortony & Terence J. Turner, 'What’s basic about basic
emotions?', Psychological Review 97 (1990), 315-31) nor on a universal set of
emotions shared by all. At the other extreme I suspect that William M. Reddy
has over-estimated the extent to which emotions are culturally constructed. (The
Navigation of Feeling: a framework for the history of emotions (Cambridge
University Press, 2001)). His historical study of changing feelings, however, is
thought-provoking. (I am grateful to Jeanice Brooks for pointing me towards his
work.) Back to context...
76.
Nussbaum (2007), 231-2, argues that in such situations music can model the
bodily movements of the observer taking in or later describing the awesome
object, and that the listener shifts back and forth between the viewpoints of
observer and observed. Back to context...
77.
Susan Metcalfe-Casals (acc. Gerald Moore), Schubert, ‘Die junge Nonne',
matrix CTPX 3884-1, issued on HMV JG 20, rec. 7 July 1937. Back to context...
78.
'Beethoven's last piano sonata and those who chase crocodiles: cross-domain
mappings of auditory pitch in a musical context', summarised in ed. Mario
 Baroni, Anna Rita Addessi, Roberto Caterina & Marco Costa, 9th International
Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 6th Triennial Conference of the
European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music: Abstracts (University of
Bologna, August 22-26, 2006), 286-7. Back to context...
79.
Lula Mysz-Gmeiner (alto) accompanied by Julius Dahlke (piano), mat. 289/90
br, rec. June 1928, issued on B 44148/9, Polydor 21455. I am grateful to Karsten
Lehl for a flat transfer. This performance is discussed in detail in Leech-
Wilkinson (2007), 220-29, where the sound file has more (too much) noise
reduction. Back to context...
80.
As a further example, which readers may like to interpret themselves, Data File
12 (sv file) provides detailed information about Sound File 18 (wav file),
Fischer-Dieskau’s 1951 ‘Am Feierabend’, discussed in chapter 4 above. Back to
context...
81.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (acc. Gerald Moore), Schubert, ‘Das Fischermädchen’
(Schwanengesang), matrix OEA 15947-2, rec. 6 October 1951, issued on HMV
DA 2045. transfer © King’s College London 2007. A note on how this table
works: each line of the poem is given complete in italics in the left column, with
a translation in the middle column; beneath that, the first column picks out of the
line in italics the words Fischer-Dieskau emphasises in his performance, the
middle column describes what he does in sound to produce the emphasis, and
the right column suggests what this may signal to the listener. Back to context...
82.
To test this we need more refined versions of the experiments that lie behind
Patrik Juslin's table of the musical correlates of basic emotions (Juslin (2001),
315). Back to context...
83.
Schwarzkopf (2002), 88. Back to context...
84.
Handel (1999), 378. Back to context...
85.
For a condensed survey see John C.M. Brust, 'Music and the neurologist: a
historical perspective', in Peretz & Zatorre (2003), 181-91 at 184. On music's
usefulness in treating stoke patients see Michael H. Thaut, 'Rhythm, human
temporality, and brain function', in ed. Miell et al (2005), 171-91. Back to
context...
86.
Leech-Wilkinson (2006a), 62-3. Back to context...
87.
Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo & Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion
(Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Juslin (2001), 329. Back to
context...
88.
See especially Sloboda (1998). Back to context...
89.
For evidence for the close relatedness of the vocal and musical expression of
emotion see Juslin & Laukka (2003). And on the likelihood that cues conveying
specific emotions derive from speech cues see Juslin (2003), 294. Back to
 context...
90.
This is not the place to rehearse past debates, stretching back to the 18th century
and beyond, about the origins of music. At the moment it’s widely accepted that
singing and speech are much older than musical instruments, with a consensus in
favour of seeing music and speech as specialised adaptations of pre-linguistic
vocal communication inherited from our primate ancestors. (See especially
Mithen (2005); Brown (2000); Steven Brown, 'Contagious heterophony: a new
theory about the origins of music', Musicae Scientiae 11 (2007) 3-26; Bruce
Richman, 'How music fixed "nonsense" into significant formulas: on rhythm,
repetition, and meaning', in Wallin et al. (2000), 301-14). This would, of course,
help to explain why instrumental music owes so much of its expressive
gesturing in sound to the representation of emotional states by the singing voice.
Back to context...
91.
Jascha Heifetz, Schubert, ‘Ave Maria’ (arr. violin and piano), matrix A21072,
issued on HMV DB 1047 (rec. 1926). Back to context...
92.
For readers who wish to test this here are Scott's remaining stanzas: Ave, Maria!
Undefiled! / The flinty couch we now must share, / Shall seem with down of
eider piled / If Thy, if Thy protection hover there. / The murky cavern's heavy
air / Shall breath of Balm if thou hast smiled; / Then, Maiden hear a maiden's
prayer. / Oh Mother, hear a suppliant child! / Ave Maria! / Ave, Maria! Stainless
styled! / Foul demons of the earth and air, / From this their wonted haunt exiled,
/ Shall flee, shall flee before thy presence fair. / We bow us to our lot of care /
Beneath Thy guidance reconciled, / Hear for a maid a maiden's prayer; / And for
a father bear a child! / Ave Maria! Back to context...
93.
Heifetz also waters down Wilhelmj’s arrangement in a number of respects,
bringing it closer to Schubert’s score. Back to context...
94.
Which might on occasion be expectation for a change, in which case no change
would be the expressive gesture. Back to context...
95.
Alf Gabrielsson & Siv Lindström Wik, ‘Strong experiences related to music: a
descriptive system’, Musicae Scientiae, 7 (2003), 157-217; Alf Gabrielsson,
'Emotions in strong experiences with music', in Juslin & Sloboda (2001) 431-49.
Back to context...
96.
See also Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press,
2000). Back to context...
97.
For a good introduction see Jacqueline Schmidt Peters, Music Therapy: an
introduction (Springfield, IL.: Charles C. Thomas, 2nd rev. ed. 2000) and for an
excellent overview of research, ed. William B. Davis, Michael H. Thaut, & Kate
E. Gfeller, An Introduction to Music Therapy: theory and practice (2nd rev. ed.,
Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998). On the wider range of music therapies see ed.
Tony Wigram, Jos De Backer, & Colwyn Trevarthen, Clinical Applications of
Music Therapy in Developmental Disability, Paediatrics and Neurology
(London: Kingsley, 1999); and ed. David Aldridge, Music Therapy and
 Neurological Rehabilitation: performing health (London: Kingsley, 2005). Back
to context...
98.
Kari Batt-Rawden, Susan Trythall and Tia De Nora, 'Health musicking as
cultural inclusion', in ed. Jane Edwards, Music: Promoting Health and Creating
Community in Healthcare Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press,
2007), 64-82. See also ed. David Aldridge, Music Therapy in Dementia Care
(London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000). Back to context...
99.
Labrande & Sturrock (1999), DVD chapter 19, 0hr 56’11”–58’47”. Back to
context...
100.
Matrix 2EA12085-2 (rec. June 1947), 0’55”–3’40”, issued on HMV DB 6502.
Back to context...
101.
Matrix 2EA2140-1 (rec. 4 July 1935), 0’48”–3’23”, issued on HMV DB 2581.
Back to context...
102.
Lehmann recorded the cycle twice, Baker at least three times. The versions I am
thinking of are Lehmann (with an instrumental trio conducted by Frieder
Weissmann) on Parlophone RO 20090/93 (rec. 10 Nov 1928), reissued on Pearl
GEMM CD 9119, and Baker (with Martin Isepp) on Saga XID 5277 (rec. 1966).
Back to context...
103.
On the evolution of musical ability see especially: Nicholas Bannan, 'Music in
human evolution: an adaptationist approach to voice acquisition', PhD thesis,
University of Reading, 2002; Mithen (2005); Wallin et al. (2000); Ian Cross,
'Music and cognitive evolution', in Robin Dunbar & Louise Barrett (eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2007),
649-67. Back to context...
104.
Miller (2000); see chapter 7 above. Back to context...
105.
James A. Russell, 'Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion',
Psychological Review 110 (2003), 145-72. Back to context...
106.
Ian Cross, ‘The evolutionary nature of musical meaning’, Musicae Scientiae
(forthcoming); and, ‘Music and meaning, ambiguity and evolution’, in ed. Miell
et al (2005), 27-43. Back to context...
107.
Kari Kallinen & Niklas Ravaja, ‘Emotion perceived and emotion felt: same and
different’, Musicae Scientiae 10 (2006), 191-213. Back to context...

Document Contents

• 8. Expressive gestures
o 8.1. Performance expression
o 8.2. A methodology for studying expression and expressive gestures
o 8.3. Sounds from speech, sounds from life
o 8.4. Music can model...
 o 8.5. Expressivity and signification in instrumental music

©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, England, United Kingdom.
Tel +44 (0)20
The Changing Sound of Music:
Approaches to Studying Recorded
Musical Performances
by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

9. Conclusion
¶1 In concluding with the evolutionary value of music we’ve come a long way from the
making of early recordings and the information stamped on discs. But once one starts to
think about the evidence of recordings the rest easily follows. Recordings show us that
musicianship has changed over the past hundred years more than we could ever have
imagined. As soon as we start to ask how performances of the same piece in 1900 and
2000 could be so different we are already asking questions about music’s identity and
about how it moves us and why. And those questions, because they are questions about
perception and cognition, lead us inevitably into the brain, how it works with sound and
why it evolved to work in that way. It’s now clear that to understand music we need to
know how it is constructed in the mind (mind being what the brain does) and how mind
allows music to be so variable and yet apparently to move humans now just as
profoundly as it has in other times.

¶2 Now we have enough recordings to see how music changes, understanding it can no
longer be a matter of a taking rule-based approach to studying scores and reading the
results in a historical context. Scores still matter; their notes still function in relation to
rules that change over time; they can still be placed usefully in their original historical
context. But what they mean depends on how they sound to people, and how they sound
to people depends on the configuration of their minds; and that is not just a historical
issue. I don’t believe that we can sensibly talk about music any more without
considering how it sounds and how it feels. How it sounds before our own time is
something we cannot know in nearly enough detail without recordings. How it feels is
something we cannot know in nearly enough detail without people to study as they
listen. Music is becoming a subject concerned with the present and the recent past, and
if we want that to change we must start collecting data now that will give the future
enough detail about the past for it to understand what music meant to us.

¶3 What I’ve tried to do in this book is far more modest, needless to say, nothing more
than a small step towards a view of how music might be studied if we were to take the
evidence of performance more fully on board. I’ve aimed simply to show some of the
things we need to know, and some of the things we need to think about, in order to
study performances using recordings. At the same time I’ve tried to outline some of the
areas that might usefully make up a field of study, areas in which more research effort
might be focussed. Scholars interested in working on performance are still quite
uncertain how to go about it, and I’ve tried to suggest some approaches that may be
fruitful. But I’m just as aware of how undesirable it is to pin a subject down to a set of
given methodologies. I’ve seen how limiting that is in other fields, and I’m concerned
above all to set people thinking creatively rather than to give them a programme for
study. It may be useful, though, to outline some of the areas in which work on music is
to be found, and the kind of work being done there, if only because it helps us to rethink
their categorisation. And that’s essential: categorisation is as much as anything the
problem holding us back.

documenting recordings, performers, organisations,

Archival research:
technologies.
Discography: listing, dating, locating recordings
Sociology: how music in performance is understood and used; listening
Information and Media
how recordings are disseminated and used
Studies:
Music: what performers have done with scores
Linguistics: semiotics of performance; metaphor
Gesture studies: (especially) performer’s bodily gestures
Psychology: music cognition
music perception; neural substrates of music;
Neuroscience:
neuropathology of music
music therapy; music in medicine, palliative care, geriatrics,
Healthcare:
rehabilitation, mental health
musical development in infancy and childhood;
Developmental studies:
implications for adult music-making
recordings as models of performance; learning; performance
Education:
strategies
music’s evolutionary value; music and natural selection;
Evolution:
music and memes
Electronic engineering: approaches to sound analysis; visualisation of sound
Anthropology: musical artefacts and practices
Ethnomusicology: music in societies; musical practices
artificial intelligence and performance; computational
Computer science:
approaches to performance analysis
Physics: acoustics; modelling of instruments and voices
Mechanical engineering: surface mapping of recordings
Mathematics: techniques for modelling musical shapes
Zoology: vocal communication in animals

¶4 This is a very partial list of subject disciplines in which research on music is

happening at the moment. There is a huge amount of it, and almost all of it is happening
outside university music departments. As a statistic consider that the abstract book of
the 2006 International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, from the first
third of which I compiled this list, ran to 600 pages. It conceals a great deal of overlap,
similar work being done in quite different fields, much of it unnoticed by the
overlapping disciplines because of lack of communication between experts in different
areas. For instance, much of the work in neuroscience takes as its evidence the
compromised performance of patients with brain damage, typically caused by stroke.
By correlating the area of the brain that’s been damaged with the cognitive deficits that
result it’s gradually been possible to build up both a map of what happens where and
also a much clearer picture of the extent to which mental skills that seem unified are in
fact distributed between separate components, each of which performs a simpler sub-
task. What’s particularly interesting for musicians is that so many of these modules
correspond to categories of music theory. We now know, for example, that the brain has
distinct neural networks for each component of rhythm as music analysts understand it:
tempo, duration, pattern, and meter; and that melodic perception deals separately with
pitch, contour, interval, and tonality. 1 But do music theorists know about this? Very
few, it would seem. Neuroscience finds out as much music theory as it thinks it needs;
music theory on the whole doesn’t imagine that neuroscience might have anything to
tell it about music.

¶5 To take another example, work by scholars in Medical Psychology and Behavioral

Neurobiology, and in Cognitive Neuroscience, suggests that mental singing may
involve more areas associated with emotional processing than actual singing, 2 which
perhaps bears out the testimony of expert score readers who claim to prefer reading
scores to listening. The sounds they imagine are more emotionally laden than the
process of making those sounds in performance, or than decoding someone else’s
performance would be. If borne out by further work this could be extraordinarily
important for music departments, yet it seems unlikely to reach them thanks to the huge
disciplinary gulf separating this kind of work from musicology.

¶6 Steven Mithen reports research in anaesthesia which finds that patients recuperating
after minor operations recover more quickly through music, probably because they are
more relaxed. Pain tolerance is greater when accompanied by soothing music, so much
so that in some procedures it’s been found possible to reduce the dose of anaesthetic by
a significant amount. 3 Mithen points out that this is relevant to anthropological studies
of societies that use music in healing; yet anthropologists and music therapists seem
largely unaware of each others’ existence: an example of the ways barriers between
disciplines prevent the development of research with huge potential benefits. 4

¶7 All the subject areas I’ve listed above have vital knowledge and techniques to
contribute to the study of how music works in performance. Yet for the most part,
research groups active in each of these areas are working locally, talking to their own
subject colleagues, using music as an exemplification of things their colleagues find
professionally interesting. But for music research to fulfil its potential, both through its
applications in our lives and though its ability to link disciplines together, we need
exchange, especially between all these corners of science and the humanities in which
research on music is being done. There’s huge potential. Music, considered as the sound
and experience of musical performance, is an extraordinarily wide-ranging subject that
transcends disciplinary boundaries just as it transcends modular boundaries in our brains
and social and cultural boundaries in our lives.

¶8 I hope to have persuaded you, if of nothing more, that studying music as

performance leads us towards a view of music that takes the subject beyond the scope of
existing musicology, which at the moment has little idea of its potential. The first task,
then, for anyone starting work in this field is to find out enough of what is going on
elsewhere to see how knowledge drawn from other disciplines (most of it, incidentally,
empirically acquired) can be used to inform work on music by those trained in the
humanities. The consequence should be, over time, that the distinction between science
and humanities work on music becomes ever more blurred. It’s worth considering that if
there is any humanities subject that can potentially be substantially understood through
the application of scientific method it is music. 5

¶9 It must also be clear that interaction and collaboration are key ideas that should
become increasingly attractive to people who work on music as performance. We’ve
seen again and again how performance gestures call on multiple associations at the
same time as they interact with the musical score. There’s a close similarity between my
view and Nicholas Cook’s interaction of autonomous agents. 6 My agents are slightly
different—some physiological, some psychological, acoustic, perceptual, in the score,
in the performance, in speech, emotions; some are universals, some deeply embedded in
western musical culture, some more specific to academically trained musicians, some
personal—but the processes we’re hypothesising are very similar. They’re negotiating
new interrelationships in every performance and probably from moment to moment
within a performance; so at any moment there’s a very complex mix being produced in
the mind, determining how we feel about what we’re hearing (and how we hear it). It’s
important that they’re not hierarchically arranged but interact, with leading roles
changing according to the nature of the ingredients and what they seem to mean to us.

¶10 This process in turn requires a collaborative approach to study. Music is so

powerful because it engages the mind on so many levels. No one person can be expert
in all of them. So as part of the process of finding out what is going on elsewhere we
need also to make contacts, to explore possibilities for collaborative research, and to get
funding for truly interdisciplinary projects. That gives us a much better chance than we
have at the moment of making real progress in understanding how music works.

¶11 To think of music in the way I’ve been suggesting is also to change the way we
hear it. Music cognition is a physical process that generates signals in the brain which
we teach ourselves to perceive in ways that suit us. For a long time musicology has
preferred that perception to be predominantly pattern-recognition, since that has proved
to make the richest use of the information provided in scores. But it’s also possible for
us to perceive those electro-chemical signals in other ways, not necessarily to the
exclusion of pattern-recognition. Musical meaning can be generated, too, by attending
to the quality of sound, to details of timing, frequency and amplitude that are not
indicated by the composer’s notation and that may vary widely between instances of the
piece. And the meanings generated by listening that way—by listening the way
performers listen (when they’re really concentrating)—are potentially just as rich,
perhaps richer, than the meanings we apply through interpretation of the score.

¶12 To experience music more fully, I’d suggest, we—and academics above all—need
to make more contact with the emotional side of musical perception. Non-academic
music lovers seem to have far less difficulty with this. We have laboured long and hard
to make our knowledge of music different from theirs, and to train our students to be
like us. We’ve learned many fascinating things about music as a result. But we’ve
overlooked a lot too. A musicology of performance can help us to recover some of that
and add it to what we already know. By attending to music as performance we can
relearn what it is like to hear music as sound. By becoming closer listeners to sound and
more responsive listeners to the quality of sound we can not just recover that experience
of music but can enrich it by learning to hear more and to respond more deeply.

• <Back to top>
 • <Next section>

Footnotes

1.
For a good introduction see Peretz (2003). For a schematic map of these
networks, based on Peretz's work, see Mithen (2005), 63. Back to context...
2.
Boris Kleber, Niels Birbaumer, Ralf Veit & Martin Lotze, 'The brain in concert-
activation during actual and imagined singing in professionals', in ed. Mario
Baroni, Anna Rita Addessi, Roberto Caterina & Marco Costa, 9th International
Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 6th Triennial Conference of the
European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music: Abstracts (University of
Bologna, August 22-26, 2006), 247-8. Back to context...
3.
Ulrica K. Nilsson, Narinder Rawal & Mitra Unosson, ‘A comparison of intra-
operative or postoperative exposure to music – a controlled trial of the effects on
postoperative pain’, Anaesthesia 58:7 (2003), 699-703; Caroline Lepage, Pierre
Drolet, Michel Girard, Yvan Grenier, & Richard DeGagne, ‘Music decreases
sedative requirements during spinal anesthesia’, Anesthesia and Analgesia, 93
(2001), 912–16. Back to context...
4.
Mithen (2005), 96. Back to context...
5.
It may even be some dim realisation of this that lies behind the relative lack of
attention given music by cultural studies, as lamented by Sterne (2003), 3-4.
Back to context...
6.
‘Theorizing Musical Meaning’, Music Theory Spectrum, 23 (2001), 170-95.
Back to context...
©2009 King's College London, Strand, London WC2