R O B I N S T O W E L L
Evidence in musicology may be described, as in jurisprudence, as information discovered or provided in an investigation to establish conclusively the truth about something in question. It offers the vital raw materials for the progress of research in numerous musicological sub-disciplines, and it is especially impor-tant in performance for those who wish to recover knowledge and attempt to recreate a former sound world– and mostly without the benefit of any aural legacy from the period concerned. Such evidence takes a rich variety of forms, as illustrated by a memorial volume to Thurston Dart in which each contrib-utor uses a particular type of source-study, creating a veritable‘case-book of musical research’.1Such diversity is also demonstrated in the present volume, especially in those chapters in Parts II–VII inclusive.
Most performers utilise the evidence of source materials to forge so-called
‘historically informed performances’, implementing technique, styles and tastes appropriate to the music and attempting to establish features of it that conven-tional notation does not detail– these may comprise anything from musica ficta provision to the determination of, amongst other issues, instrumentation, pitch levels, tuning, rhythmic considerations, specific and extempore ornamentation, articulation, accentuation, dynamic nuances and, in Baroque music, the realisation of continuo accompaniments. Authoritative interpretation of the evidence for this variety of performance issues requires detailed historical study, and the potential exists for a diversity of interpretations of the information acquired, as well as for more than one acceptable solution. And, of course, all the evidence in the world will never guarantee performances that are convincing and vivid.
There will nearly always be gaps in the total picture, as Colin Lawson verifies in his case study of Mozart’s last three symphonies.2The situation worsens the further one ventures back in time from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as John Haines verifies in Chapter 8. Much music of ‘the medieval millennium’
was transmitted orally and little written-down music of that era has survived the
1 I. Bent (ed.), Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music, London, Stainer & Bell, 1981, preface, p. 11.
2 See Chapter 23.
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ravages of time. It is only rarely that a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century writer about music will inform us about the musical instruments or performance practice of his age. The relationship between the performer, the instruments and the evidence is a constantlyfluctuating one and the most meaningful performances result from an open-minded interaction between the three.
What is vitally important is that the evidence furnished by the various sources prompts scholars and performers to raise questions and seek answers through enquiry, thought and experiment, applying performance practices as appropriate; and there has been an increasing understanding that the use of the fullest possible contexts around performances is helpful in amplifying and correcting sometimes simplistic approaches to performance practice. Stephen Crist, for example, demonstrates how information gained from biblical and hymnological sources can enhance the interpretation of music manuscript sources of Bach’s church cantatas;3 and the same parent volume includes Ellen Harris’s case study of Mozart’s Mitridate, in which she uses Mozart’s text and ornamentation practice, epistolary evidence, a contem-porary treatise by Corri, practical experiment and her own musical experience to create a credible interpretation.4
Glen Haydon’s two principal categories of historical evidence used in musi-cology,‘material remains’ and ‘written records’, will provide the cornerstones of this chapter and dictate its shape.5‘Material remains’ embraces musical instru-ments, sound recordings andfilm, pictures and reliefs, and all buildings used for musical purposes, whether churches, concert halls, theatres or opera houses;
‘written records’ include materials as wide-ranging as musical monuments (all music preserved in notation, whether printed or in manuscript), historical writings of all kinds, general literature, public documents containing records and data, private documents such as letters, diaries, household accounts and estate records, and newspapers, journals and concert programmes. Evidence from these sources is sometimes supplemented by oral tradition, as, for example, in instrumental and vocal pedagogy, in the addition of ornamentation to vocal and instrumental music, in musical performances involving improvisation, and in thefields of secular music of the Middle Ages, Gregorian church music, folk music and jazz.
3 S. A. Crist,‘Historical theology and hymnology as tools for interpreting Bach’s church cantatas: the case of Ich elender Mensch, wer wird mich erlösen, BWV 48’, in S. A. Crist and R. M. Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations. Festschrift for Robert L. Marshall, University of Rochester Press, 2004, pp. 57–84.
4 E. T. Harris,‘Mozart’s Mitridate: going beyond the text’, in Crist and Marvin (eds.), Historical Musicology, pp. 95–120.
5 G. Haydon,‘The sources of musical history’, in G. Haydon (ed.), Introduction to Musicology, New York, Prentice Hall, 1941, p. 267.
Material remains Musical instruments
Surviving instruments furnish much historical and ethnological evidence about performance issues and provide the vital apparatus for‘laboratory’ experiments in matters of technique, interpretation and style. Even sofierce a critic of literal approaches to historical performance as Richard Taruskin acknowledges ‘the inestimable and indispensable value of the old instruments in freeing minds and hands to experience old music newly’,6an importance amply demonstrated by, for example, Fenner Douglass, whose experiments with the realisation of ornaments on seventeenth-century French organs have proved far more instructive than reading theorists’ descriptions.7Furthermore, the light touch, clear articulation and expressiveflexibility of Viennese-action pianos are as much key to the under-standing of Mozart’s music for performance as the recognition that Haydn intended his keyboard sonatas for the more sonorous English action piano by the mid-1790s;8 and Kerman concedes that ‘Certain notorious problematic Beethoven markings. . . make immediate sense in the sonorous world of the actual instrument he played when he wrote them’.9
The study of musical instruments in performance history before 1600 is very much in its infancy and is based almost entirely on secondary evidence, including paintings and‘lists of instruments in literary works of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (such as Machaut’s enumerations in his poems Remède de Fortune and La prise d’Alexandrie, and the lists in the anonymous fourteenth-century Echecs amoureux)’.10Howard Mayer Brown outlines the various kinds of evidence required to‘form plausible hypotheses, or to reach defensible conclu-sions’, about the ways in which musical instruments were employed in the Middle Ages.11It includes reliable information about which instruments existed at particular times and places, when each was invented or introduced into the major European countries, how each was played, how techniques and perform-ance conventions may have varied nationally over the years, and which musical repertoires (written and unwritten) were regularly associated with instruments.
Brown recognises the shortcomings of the various sources, bemoaning, for
6 R. Taruskin, Text and Act, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 148.
7 See F. Douglass, The Language of the Classical French Organ, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1969, rev. 2nd edn, 1995.
8 See Chapter 22.
9 J. Kerman,‘The historical performance movement’, in J. Kerman, Musicology, London, Fontana, 1985, p. 213.
10 In S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, 29 vols., London, Macmillan, 2001, vol. 19, p. 354, art.‘Performing practice’.
11 See H. M. Brown,‘Instruments’, in H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, pp. 15–36.
example, that the history of the medievalfiddle, like that of many other instru-ments, has still only partially been traced, Bachmann’s acclaimed study of the origins of bowing in Western Europe notwithstanding.12Still unknown is
‘how the instrument changed its shape and function from decade to decade and from country to country’, and ‘how both flat and rounded bridges were used (and when, why, and with which repertories)’; and some hypotheses must be offered ‘to explain the presence, in a number of pictures, of what looks like a second bridge between the bow and thefingerboard’.13
In traditional musical cultures instruments are artefacts which not only produce sounds but also convey meaning, thereby extending their value as historical evidence. This extra dimension is determined by their functional and symbolic role in society and the factors regulating their use, which is often linked‘to beliefs, to the spiritual or temporal power, the institutions, the cycle of life, and various other circumstances, some codified and some not’.14It thus follows that ‘the specific ceremonies accompanying the consecration of an instrument, the underwritten rules defining its part in ritual, the taboos presiding over its making and its use, and the myths (written or orally transmitted) about its origin (natural or supernatural)’ serve as evidence of its importance to that particular social grouping.15
The complex web of evidence yielded by research in thisfield may embrace any combination of musical, technical, aesthetic, symbolic, historical and eth-nological issues. It may inform us how playing techniques influenced sound production (for example, continuous or discontinuous blowing in various aerophones), how instruments were constructed and how people used and developed the creative skills applied to that end (basket-making, pottery, metal-casting and forging, wood-carving or whatever). It may also lead us to conclude whether an instrument is indigenous or whether it was imported from another culture, and it may yield numerous musical‘leads’ such as detail about the genre or general repertoire, the composer, the language of any text (if relevant), the ensemble, playing techniques and the mode of performance, or the circumstances of performance.
Private and public collections worldwide have proved invaluable in preserv-ing instruments, whether for use in performance, as objects of veneration or visual art, artefacts for financial investment, or to furnish ethnological and historical evidence, illustrate technological developments or serve as models for new construction. Some of the most significant early collections of Western
12 W. Bachmann, The Origins of Bowing and the Development of Bowed Instruments up to the Thirteenth Century, trans. N. Deane, Oxford University Press, 1969.
13 Brown,‘Instruments’, in Brown and Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music before 1600, p. 18.
14 In H. Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, New York, Norton, 1992, p. 291. 15 Ibid.
musical instruments were amassed by the Este family in Modena, the Contarini family in Venice, Prince Ferdinando de Medici in Florence and, during the sixteenth century, the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck. One of the oldest institutional collections still prospering is that (est. 1824) of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. The acquisition of Clapisson’s collection by the Paris Conservatoire in 1864, the creation of the Brussels Conservatoire’s museum from the private collections of Fétis, Mahillon and others in the 1870s and the Berlin Königliche Hochschule für Musik’s procurement of Paul de Wit’s first collection in 1888 were matched by private collectors such as Auguste Tolbecque in France, Carl Engel and Alfred Hipkins in Britain and Morris Steinert in the USA. The explosion in the number of specialist instrument collections established since these sparks of interest is attested by the lengthy lists included in relevant publications.16 Among other leading centres of conservation today are the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna), Musikinstrumenten-Museums in Munich, Leipzig and Markneukirchen, the American Shrine to Music Museum (University of South Dakota, Vermillion) and the Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), and various British collections in London (Boosey and Hawkes, Horniman and Victoria and Albert Museums, the Wallace Collection, and the Royal College of Music), Gloucester (Folk Museum), Oxford (Bate Collection), Wigan (Rimmer Collection) and Edinburgh (University).
Photographs, descriptions, construction plans, measurements and other detailed information included in the catalogues of many of these collections have also proved valuable in disseminating knowledge about organology. Some instruments have not survived outside museums– the crwth, pommer and viola bastarda, for example– while others have survived in modified forms, due to progress in their construction methods and, in some cases, radical technical developments.
The increased practice of collecting instruments has inevitably raised the controversy over the relative claims of preservation and investigation through use. The potential benefits of restoration have had to be weighed continually against the possible destruction of original evidence.17 Most museums and institutions have taken the conservative option and preserved their instruments in stable conditions and in scientifically monitored environments, but some have attempted reconditioning and some private collectors and
16 A comprehensive list of instrument collections worldwide is provided in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, pp. 432–67, art. ‘Instruments, collections of ’.
17 The complex set of issues surrounding the preservation, restoration and use of old instruments is discussed further by Robert Barclay in Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, pp. 468–70, art.‘Instruments, conservation, restoration, copying of ’.
conservatoires have taken the bolder step of allowing their instruments to be loaned to careful users.
The preservation of early instruments has proved of inestimable value to modern makers of reproductions; it made a reality of Harnoncourt’s dream to differentiate between oboes, oboes d’amore and the prescribed oboes da caccia for Nos. 48, 49, 59 and 60 in J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Harnoncourt commis-sioned replicas of oboes da caccia from Leipzig prototypes (by Eichentopf) dis-covered in museums in Stockholm and Copenhagen during the 1970s.18A special form of taille or tenor oboe in F covered in leather and bent in a semicircle, with a brass bell like a hunting horn,19the oboe da caccia had a unique dark timbre and dynamicflexibility. Bach employs it for especially tender moments, sometimes in combination with the transverseflute (as in Nos. 48 and 49). The replicas gain most of the advantages of restoration without endangering the original instru-ment and, thanks to organological research, may represent the original state even when the original instrument has been modified. More recently, sophisticated computer modelling software has been used, along with acoustical and other evidence, to recreate the long, slender trumpet-like instrument called the lituus for period performance of J. S. Bach’s motet ‘O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht’
BWV118.20
Examination of exhibits in the world’s collections has also provided instru-ment researchers with a rich mine of clues about issues of performance history.
For example, the development of techniques such as dendrochronology for dating and authenticating wooden objects and instruments has led to a realisa-tion that many bowed instruments may be of more recent manufacture or more drastically altered than had been previously thought. Long-held attributions have thus been challenged, notably the origins of Stradivari’s ‘Messiah’ violin, and a more realistic view of the development of viols and violins, especially in Italy, has begun to emerge. Some of the information gained is often frustrat-ingly insufficient, notably that concerning pitch in the period and geographical area of some instruments’ construction (particularly woodwinds and organs).
However, as David Ponsford reminds us in Chapter 18, much can be gained from their examination, provided that the problems of general wear-and-tear, as well as wood shrinkage in woodwinds and tuning damage and changes of wind pressure in organs, are taken into account.
18 N. Harnoncourt,‘The oboe da caccia’, notes to Das Kantatenwerk, vol. 7, Teldec Records, 1973, p. 13.
19 Johann Heinrich Eichentopf was a distinguished Leipzig maker of brass instruments; models by other eighteenth-century makers generally have wooden bells.
20 This has been a collaborative project between the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and acousticians at the University of Edinburgh.
Historically accurate replicas of accessories such as reeds, brass mouthpieces and strings are also essential, otherwise the perception of an instrument and its repertoire may be entirely transformed. Musical boxes, musical clocks, barrel organs and other mechanically governed‘instruments’ from the eighteenth century onwards also provide fairly accurate information about relative pitch and rhythmic values.21Some insight into absolute tempo values can also be gained by timing performances so preserved.
Eleanor Selfridge-Field has drawn attention to some of the advantages and disadvantages of modern reconstruction of instruments for historical perform-ance and demonstrates how the problems that modern makers have attempted to overcome can sometimes have a negative impact. She cites the Charles Fisk Organ (1983) at Stanford University, with its duplicate pipes for‘mean-tone’
and‘well-tempered’ tunings, pointing out that ‘it creates a corresponding need for“push button” adaptability among collaborating instrumentalists and sing-ers that was not a requisite of earlier times’.22 Similar earlier attempts at conflating past and present to facilitate the performance process, such as the so-called‘Bach bow’, various hybrid keyboard instruments and other organo-logical freaks, have not gained currency. However, makers have allowed com-promises in the construction of replica period instruments, notably the use of modern materials which have been proven to be more reliable (e.g. the use of ebonite rather than wood for early clarinet mouthpieces), the relocation of finger-holes on wind instruments to ‘improve’ intonation, or even the addition of some keys to woodwind instruments to facilitate accurate execution.
Sound recordings
The evolution and development of recording technology from the late nine-teenth century onwards have provided musicologists and ethnomusicologists with vital means for preserving, duplicating and moving raw data in a way that many other disciplines were unable to achieve until the advent of computer technology.23For ethnomusicologists, recording (using sound recorders and photographic and video cameras) has become one of the primary methods of collecting evidence systematically during essentialfieldwork. It has comple-mented the irreplaceable notebook since Jesse Fewkesfirst used the Edison cylinder machine in thefield during his research with the Passamaquoddy Indians of the north-eastern USA (1890) and the Zuni and Hopi Pueblos of
21 The instruments of the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, for example, suggest that he played at a0=440, lower than the norm in many places for his time. See Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. 19, p. 376, art.‘Performing Practice’.
22 In H. M. Brown and S. Sadie (eds.), Performance Practice: Music after 1600, London, Macmillan, 1989, p. 16.
23 Krister Malm offers a useful history of technological developments in ethnomusicological research in
‘The Music Industry’, in Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, pp. 349–64.
Arizona (1890–1).24 The phonograph and its numerous later developments enabled easy capture and transmission of evidence for oral, unwritten tradi-tions and offered playback potential for transcription and analytical purposes (e.g. analysing ornamentation practices).
Once considered merely as old-fashioned curiosities, acoustic and electrical commercial recordings furnish vital aural evidence of past performing practices, preserving some of the most distinguished readings of our forebears, often given or conducted by the composers themselves (for example, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Stravinsky and Bartók) or by musicians with whom they were associated, or whose interpretations they approved.25We can even hear on record the vocal range, timbre and expressive vocabulary of the last castrato of the Cappella Sistina, Alessandro Moreschi, offering us clues as to the sound quality of a voice type which, though now obsolete, was so important in the performance of Roman Catholic church music and eighteenth-century opera. Recordings also illustrate performance practices of the early twentieth century in far greater detail than any prose account in any instrumental treatises or other printed documentation, as well as bearing witness to the evolution of more recent performing trends. Most importantly, they force us ‘to question unspoken
Once considered merely as old-fashioned curiosities, acoustic and electrical commercial recordings furnish vital aural evidence of past performing practices, preserving some of the most distinguished readings of our forebears, often given or conducted by the composers themselves (for example, Rachmaninov, Elgar, Stravinsky and Bartók) or by musicians with whom they were associated, or whose interpretations they approved.25We can even hear on record the vocal range, timbre and expressive vocabulary of the last castrato of the Cappella Sistina, Alessandro Moreschi, offering us clues as to the sound quality of a voice type which, though now obsolete, was so important in the performance of Roman Catholic church music and eighteenth-century opera. Recordings also illustrate performance practices of the early twentieth century in far greater detail than any prose account in any instrumental treatises or other printed documentation, as well as bearing witness to the evolution of more recent performing trends. Most importantly, they force us ‘to question unspoken