John Butt

Do Musical Works Contain an Implied Listener? Towards a Theory of Musical Listening

ABSTRACT This study presents the sketch of a theory of musical listening based on historical considerations of the role of music in Western culture. A universal element of musical listening might lie in the notion that all music is the product of a fundamental human capacity to hear, harnessed in countless ways by diverse cultures. Secondly, there is the type of music, covering very broad historical and cultural boundaries, that presupposes attentive listening or even a participating audience; this is perhaps the simplest and most familiar category, at least in the West. Finally, there is the range of music that might contain an ‘implied listener’, something which I suggest is much more elusive, with specific historical and cultural boundaries within Western modernity. While this sense of the implied listener – someone developing the sense of a consistent and unitary self over time – is understandable today and might well still be employed in a broad range of new music, I would suggest that it now reflects only one way of being human among an alarmingly broad array of choices.

What is a ‘musical work’? Reflections on the origins of the ‘work concept’ in western art music

To many, it would still seem absurd to suggest that there is any argument to be had about how ‘musical works’ exist: the answer is surely obvious to anyone with an interest in the history of western classical music, since even the titles alone can conjure up a host of past and possible performances and, most importantly, experiences. Moreover, most musical works are associated with a documentary trace, the score, by which certain parameters are fixed, others suggested or left open, and the work can thus be identified as a document qualifying for copyright protection or authorial ownership, much in the manner of a verbal text. Already though, this very brief sketch of assumptions is reliant on specific contexts of performance, authorship, title and documentation, which are all too easily naturalised across diverse types of music (witness a growing concern with authorship, ownership and varying levels of ‘authenticity’ in reproduction within the history of popular music). There is something definitely ‘western’ about this too. While there might indeed be canons of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music in the traditions of countless non-western cultures, very few of them are concerned with documentary precision or the intellectual property rights of individual, unique creators (of course, this is not to say that western-style music, in both ‘art’ and popular categories, cannot successfully be introduced or indeed created within these cultures). If there is this synchronic observation to be made across contemporary cultures, might there not also be a diachronic one? In other words, if ‘musical works’ have more resonance in some parts of the world than others, might they not also thrive in specific eras of western history? The

The seventeenth-century musical ‘work’

There is no doubt that a handful of compositions from the seventeenth century have become part of the modern ‘classical’ repertory. If they are not quite standard concert war-horses owing to their ‘unorthodox’ scoring, they are nevertheless recognised as ‘great works’ of early music: Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas perhaps come most readily to mind. However, the vast majority of this century’s music is still seen as the province of specialist performers, somehow separate from the musical mainstream. It is not the brief of this chapter – or indeed of this book as a whole – to function as a comprehensive critique of current musical values and concert practices, yet some awareness of our own assumptions and prejudices is surely vital in any historical study whatsoever. The question that thus arises is whether musical compositions of the seventeenth century are appropriately described as ‘works’. And this leads to a whole string of further questions. Did seventeenth-century composers believe they were writing works? Did those who received these compositions believe them to be works? Or are certain pieces retroactively defined as works – as may be the case with those familiar pieces by Monteverdi and Purcell? And are these defined as works because of qualities latent within them and common to great works of all ages, or is it that they just contain elements that might be seen as conforming to a historically conditioned ideology of what a work should be?

Music in new worlds

Imagine that during the last week of December around 1600, a Portuguese vessel leaves Goa, the magnificent capital of the Portuguese Asian empire located 350 miles south of Bombay, for the six-month return to Lisbon. The bottom two layers of the four-deck ship are devoted to storing spices – mainly pepper, but the return cargo also includes cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, indigo and Chinese silk bought from Moorish traders. With the remaining two decks reserved for official cabins and the storage of privately owned chests, little room is left for the 100 sailors and a chicken coop. Crossing the Indian Ocean during the most pleasant time of the year, the ship docks briefly at the Portuguese possession of Mozambique (settled 1507) and arrives a month later at the Cape of Good Hope. But instead of rounding the Cape and sailing north up the coast of West Africa, past the Portuguese settlements of Benin (1485), the Congo ( c. 1480), Sierra Leone (1460), the archipelago of Sao Tome ( c. 1471), and the Cabo Verde islands (1444), which lie along the route that brought them to India, the Portuguese crew sails due west into the heart of the Atlantic bringing the ship almost within sight of the Brazilian coast before its sails catch the easterly winds that will allow it to tack north towards the Azores, the last stop of the over 10,000-mile round trip before reaching Lisbon. Along the way, descriptions and opinions of native instruments and musical styles are logged into diaries: a Congolese lute, xylophones from Mozambique, cymbals, drums and bells, and reed instruments.

The mature vocal works and their theological and liturgical context

Many superlatives have been lavished on Bachs mature vocal works, such as Georg Nagelis acclamation of the B minor Mass as one of the ‘greatest musical works of art of all times and of all peoples’, or Mendelssohns veneration of the Matthew Passion as ‘the greatest of Christian works’. But such evaluations have usually been based on the concept that these incomparable works of Bach are self-standing musical monuments. Following Mendelssohns revival of the Matthew Passion in 1829, Bachs cantatas, oratorios, passions, Magnificat and the B minor Mass have generally been performed as autonomous works in a concert setting. But this later usage was not what the composer envisaged. What Robert Marshall writes with regard to the cantatas applies equally to most of Bachs other vocal works: ‘such compositions were not intended primarily for the “delectation” of a concert public , but rather for the “edification” of a church congregation … Bachs cantatas, in fact, were conceived and should be regarded not as concert pieces at all but as musical sermons; and they were incorporated as such in the regular Sunday church services.’ This chapter therefore discusses these works against the background of the liturgical imperatives that brought them into being. Liturgy and music in Leipzig The specific liturgical practices of Leipzig provide the immediate context for the creation of Bachs mature vocal works. Liturgical usage in Leipzig during the eighteenth century was somewhat conservative. Compared with other areas of Germany, where traditional Lutheran liturgical forms, based on Luthers two liturgies, were already beginning to be eroded, Leipzig retained a highly developed and rich liturgical and musical tradition.

Monteverdi, the 1610 Vespers and the Beginnings of the Modern Musical Work

ABSTRACT The elevated status of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers over the last century provides the starting point for an enquiry into which factors render it so durable. In going against the grain of recent attempts to discern the possible liturgical context for its original performance, this study claims that the collection as a whole (components of which undoubtedly had liturgical origins) can only be exemplary. Moreover, Monteverdi, in his intense engagement with the impersonation of liturgical chanting, has effectively rendered it the analogue of an actual service. Several features suggest that he is capturing something of the listening experience of a liturgy, complete with its distortions and memories. As a collection that is ‘about’ Vespers and which doubles the experience one might be having, this has something in common with the ‘musical work’ as defined by later classical practice, and its very religiosity resonates with the secularized ideology of musical autonomy.

Choral Conducting: A Mythology in Practice

LAST week I conducted a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion ; one of the reviewers stated that I ‘lived and breathed every moment of the vast score, making each singer and instrumentalist an identifiable feature of the music’. What a flattering observation! How many conductors there must be who believe that they should be a visual embodiment of the music, bringing each performer to appropriate musical life with the flick of a magic wand. But do I believe a word of it? Certainly the music would not necessarily have ceased without me, and indeed some of the time I was not conducting as such, since I was also playing one of the two organs for recitatives and some arias, attempting to exert some degree of directorial authority simultaneously. But if I was able to direct while playing, then my direction must have lain in something other than any conventional array of hand gestures unpredictable pokes here and there, perhaps, a nod or a smile. Even these may have been just my way of convincing myself that I had some degree of control, although it is always heartening to any conductor that ‘O Mensch bewein’ invariably breaks down if you stop conducting and go and listen even with the most ‘expensive’ of forces (as I was fortunate to have last week). Clearly, then, a conductor does have some function in some music, some of the time. On the other hand, it does seem that belief plays a role, in terms both of the self-delusions of the conductor and of the multifarious ways in which the performers understand their relation to the director and music concerned. And clearly the audience can be impressed too. But if this was a successful performance on my account, it was surely not just a matter of turning up for the concert and taking charge. For Bach’s longest choral work, one either rehearses long hours with amateur or student performers or deals with professionals of one kind or another (sometimes combined with amateurs), in which case rehearsal time is at a premium. Either way, the preparation in rehearsal is absolutely central to the potential success of the performance and here one needs a large range of musical and non-musical skills (not least of which are time and people management). Actual conducting can play a relatively small part (particularly if one has to play something as well) and, at the very least, is part of a large array of devices to do with communication and negotiation, together with some sort of understanding of the music concerned. Different music might require a completely different range of techniques and there is obviously some difference between conducting singers and instrumentalists, although it is not clear to me why there should be two separate professions, often jealously guarded by different pedagogical traditions. My own priorities are always to

Bach: cantatas and a passion

tonal beauty of the singing and playing is outstanding. If I have a reservation, it is that the performers are inclined to understatement. Bouteiller’s style is scarcely extrovert, but like so many of his contemporaries he exploited richly dissonant suspensions in the cause of text expression. These could often have been projected more eloquently, without sacrificing the overall character of dignity and restraint—nowhere more so than in the Requiem setting, in which the performers replace three of the five vocal lines with bass viols. Such a manner of performance, while not my first choice, is surely justifiable on historical and musical grounds. Unfortunately the recording gives rather less prominence to the viols than to the voices, so that the instruments do not contribute on equal terms in the way that a five-part vocal ensemble would have done. Moreover, the performers take liberties with the scoring: although the two voices mainly sing the treble (dessus) and tenor (taille), they occasionally migrate to other lines, not necessarily in the same tessitura, while inconveniently low notes are sometimes transposed up an octave. In a live performance this would not particularly disturb me, but in the more permanent medium of CD it does. For all this, I find myself listening repeatedly to this Missa pro defunctis—in particular, to the ravishingly beautiful Pie Jesu and Agnus Dei. Instead of the macabre death’s head that stares up from the Bouteiller CD case, the cover of Jean-Henry d’Anglebert: Pièces de clavecin (Alpha 074, rec 2004) is adorned with The girl with soap bubbles by Mignard le Romain. This is a portrait of the young Mademoiselle de Tours, legitimized daughter of Louis XIV and the star pupil for whom D’Anglebert claims to have composed most of his harpsichord music. Like other Alpha releases, the booklet includes an informative essay on the cover portrait and its subject, in this case by Denis Grenier. Would that more record companies paid such attention to the wider cultural context of the music they present. Equally welcome is the imaginative planning of this release. It exploits the fact that D’Anglebert, as well as being one of the outstanding French harpsichord composers of his century, also raised the art of the keyboard arrangement to a new level. These twin aspects of his output are here revealed as never before, at least in my experience. On the first CD the harpsichordist Céline Frisch presents all but a few of the ‘original’ pieces from the suites in G major and G minor, plus nine transcriptions of movements from Lully stage works. The latter include such substantial items as the overtures to Cadmus et Hermione and Le carnaval mascarade, and the chaconnes from Phaëton and Armide. On the second CD, meanwhile, the ensemble Café Zimmerman presents agreeable accounts of the orchestral originals of the Lully pieces. Listeners with access to the facsimile of D’Anglebert’s Pieces de clavecin (New York: Broude Bros, 1965) or Kenneth Gilbert’s ‘Le pupitre’ edition (Paris: Heugel, 1975) can hear the Lully originals while following the keyboard transcriptions and can thus appreciate the extent to which D’Anglebert transforms orchestral textures into idiomatic keyboard writing. Even without the score, something of D’Anglebert’s ingenuity and skill in capturing the rich sonorities of Lully’s orchestra is apparent. Such a preamble might suggest that the virtues of these discs are primarily pedagogical. Far from it. Céline Frisch has the full measure of this music, and her playing is mercifully free of mannerism—those coy hesitations that can so impede the flow or the overused left-hand-before-right technique that recalls my granny’s piano playing. Yet there is seldom any sense of inflexibility here. The underlying pulse may remain steady, but within it there is room for plenty of freedom. Frisch plays a harpsichord by Émile Jobin modelled on an unidentified instrument by Vincent Tibaut. It sounds wonderful in the ample but never obscure acoustic of Maguelone Cathedral. She also includes the five organ fugues on a related subject, played on a suitably asthmatic organ in the Charles Nicolle hospital in Rouen. In short, this is a distinguished and multi-faceted release which should appeal to a wide range of listeners.

Fantasy and craft: the solo instrumentalist

You would hardly believe, sir, the high regard which the Italians have for those who excel on instruments, and how much more importance they attach to instrumental music than to vocal, saying that one man can produce by himself more beautiful inventions than four voices together, and that it has charms and liberties that vocal music does not have. Andre Maugars, Response faite a un curieux sur le sentiment de la musique d’Italie (Rome, 1639) In Lorenzo Bianconi’s Music in the Seventeenth Century (1987), arguably the most original and provocative recent study of the period, solo instrumental music is treated so marginally that it is not even given a chapter of its own: ‘In “practical” and statistical terms, the role of seventeenth-century instrumental music is essentially modest and of minority significance – not at all what its relatively profuse cultivation on the part of modern “baroque” musicians would suggest’. It is true that the percentage of purely instrumental volumes among surviving seventeenth-century musical editions is relatively small. Instrumental performances also left much less of a paper-trail than operas, oratorios or major civic or ecclesiastical celebrations. For a historian eager to embed music into larger political, social and cultural frameworks, they tend to remain below the horizon, in part because their functions and meanings are harder to assess. Nevertheless, the wide popularity of Baroque instrumental music in modern times should be reason enough for giving it attention. In fact, interest in early instrumental repertories, particularly of solo music, is hardly a recent phenomenon. Pianists have been broadening their scope with anthologies of ‘early keyboard music’ since the later nineteenth century, if not before, and most young piano students have been exposed to the easier pieces of Byrd, Purcell and Pachelbel. Similarly, guitarists have been extending their repertory with adaptations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lute gems, while chorale settings and preludes from Sweelinck to Buxtehude have long been an important if not indispensable part of the church organist’s working capital.

The Church Triumphant: music in the liturgy

During the seventeenth century, religious observance played an essential part in people’s lives, both as the consequence of a pervasive system of belief that was seldom questioned, and as the crucial declaration of a confessional allegiance that might also have strong political overtones. Music had an important part to play in the articulation of this allegiance, whether by an aggressive presence, as in a Catholic festal Vespers in southern Europe, or a conspicuous absence, as in Calvinist-inspired preaching services north of the Alps. In most denominations, music was recognised as a powerful if somewhat dangerous weapon, able to attract and sway men’s souls, and thus subject to sometimes considerable ecclesiastical control. As a rhetorical art, it was akin to preaching – indeed it was at times deliberately linked to it: composers were expected not only to ‘read’ sacred texts through their music but also to interpret them for their listeners. On the Catholic side, the new orders, especially the Jesuits and the Oratorians, made explicit use of music for evangelisation. Already in the 1580s, Annibale Stabile, maestro di cappella of the Jesuit-run German College in Rome, could state that he had learnt more about the setting of words from its Jesuit rector, Michele Lauretano, than he had in years of previous musical study (which had included a spell under Palestrina). The German College remained hugely influential, sending priests to all parts of Germany and as far afield as Hungary. Jesuit missionaries were also sent all over Europe and to the New World, bringing with them the advocacy of music, not least in the education of the young and in their targeting of the aristocracy; their preference was for Italian, especially Roman musical styles.