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‘Phrasing – the Very Life of Music’1: Performing the Music and Nineteenth-Century Performance Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2012

Mine Doğantan-Dack
Mine Doğantan-Dack*
Affiliation:
Middlesex University
*
Email: M.Dack@mdx.ac.uk
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Abstract

Our contemporary perspective of the relationship between the composer, the score and musical performance during the nineteenth century has been largely shaped by Lydia Goehr's widely accepted and equally widely contested narrative regarding the appearance of the regulative concept of the ‘musical work’ at the end of the eighteenth century. This narrative has been based on the assumption that during the nineteenth century the score was regarded as the locus of the work and the music. Goehr's account, however, is contrary to the essence of performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century. In this article, I present a narrative account of a neglected thread running along the music theoretical, aesthetic and pedagogical discourses of this period leading to the emergence and establishment of a profound conceptual transformation in the way the fundamentals of music making were understood and explained, and depict the rise of the concept of ‘phrasing’ as a specifically nineteenth-century phenomenon that diverges from the fundamentals of eighteenth-century performance pedagogy. I discuss the role of the new concept of phrasing in the performance theories of Mathis Lussy, Tobias Matthay and Stewart Macpherson and point out some of the widely employed metaphors and images in the teaching of phrasing during this period. The article posits that in the performance-oriented discourses of the nineteenth century, the performer's first and foremost loyalty was expected to be to ‘the music’ rather than to the score, the work or the composer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 9 , Issue 1: Theoretical and Critical Contexts in Nineteenth-Century Performance Practice , June 2012 , pp. 7 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

1

Tobias Matthay, Musical Interpretation (London: Joseph Williams, 1913): 54.

References

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7 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Goehr's thesis has been the subject of criticism and contestation in various scholarly publications, the best-known being the collection of essays in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention, edited by Michael Talbot (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). Detailed philosophical analyses regarding the status and nature of the musical work are undertaken by Stephen Davies in his Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar and Julian Dodd in his Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. See also the chapter titled ‘The Work’ in Peter Kivy's Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google ScholarPubMed. For one of the early examples of this literature on the philosophy of the musical work, see Roman Ingarden's The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (London: Macmillan Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

8 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 231.

9 Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar: 141.

10 ‘Once we accept the performer as an inevitable necessity in spite of his basic dubiousness, we may as well try to determine what properties make him estimable’, in Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1969)Google Scholar: 154. ‘The secret of perfection lies above all in [the performer's] consciousness of the law imposed on him by the work he is performing’, in Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (London: Oxford University Press, 1947)Google Scholar: 127. ‘Music need not be performed any more than books need to be read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed page; and the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print’, Arnold Schoenberg quoted in Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections 1938–76 (New York: Pendragon, 1980)Google Scholar: 164.

11 These two histories do not correspond to the two conflicting performance conceptions identified by Goehr as the main forces that shaped practice of performance since 1800 (Goehr, 2002: 134). The parallel history I discuss in this article is not confined to the conception of the practice of performance as a social phenomenon driven by the desire for expressive spontaneity, immediacy, and freedom – a conception that Goehr sets against the Werktreue practice of performance. It is rather a history that problematizes Goehr's neat dualistic conceptualization of nineteenth-century performance theory and practice.

12 Bojan Bujić, ‘Notation and Realization: Musical Performance in Historical Perspective’, in The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Krausz (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995)Google Scholar: 139.

13 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 222.

14 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 224.

15 James Methuen-Campbell, Chopin Playing: From the Composer to the Present Day (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981)Google Scholar; Mathis Lussy, L'anacrouse dans la musique moderne (Paris: Heugel, 1903)Google Scholar discusses performances of Chopin by Anton Rubinstein, in which he left out sections of the score.

16 See, for example, Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performing Style, ed. Michael Musgrave and Bernard Sherman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

17 See, Mathis Lussy, Traité de l’expression musicale: Accents, nuances et mouvements dans la musique vocal et instrumentale (Paris: Berger-Levrault & Heugel, 1874)Google Scholar; Le rythme musical: Son origine, sa fonction et son accentuation (Paris: Heugel, 1883); L'anacrouse dans la musique moderne (Paris: Heugel, 1903). Hugo Riemann's editions (Phrasierungsausgaben) of Mozart (1883), Beethoven (1885) and Haydn (1895) Piano Sonatas. Tobias Matthay, Musical Interpretation, (Boston: Boston Music Company, 1913)Google ScholarPubMed. Stewart Macpherson, Studies in Phrasing and Form (London: Joseph Williams, 1911)Google ScholarPubMed.

18 Stewart Macpherson, Studies in Phrasing and Form, second revised ed. (London: Joseph Williams, 1932)Google ScholarPubMed: 8.

19 Macpherson, Studies in Phrasing, second edition, 9.

20 Momigny, ‘Phrasé’, in Encyclopédie méthodique: musique, ed. Nicolas Etienne Framery, Pierre Louis Ginguené and Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny (Paris, 1791), vol. 2: 279.

21 Momigny, ‘Phrasing’, 279.

22 Johann Abraham Peter Schultz, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 2 vols, ed. Johann Georg Sulzer, (Berlin: Georg Ludewig, 1771–4). Quoted from Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar: 144. For a detailed discussion of the eighteenth-century views on the role and nature of musical punctuation see Brown, 1999, chapter two, ‘Accentuation and Punctuation’.

23 Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 144.

24 Daniel Gottlob Türk, Klavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen für Lehrer und Lernende, mit kritischen Anmerkungen (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1789)Google Scholar. English trans. by Raymond H. Haggh as School of Clavier Playing or Instructions in Playing the Clavier for Teachers and Students (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

25 François Couperin, L'art de toucher le clavecin (Paris, 1716), ed. and trans. Margery Halford, The Art of Playing the Harpsichord (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred, 1974)Google Scholar, 22. Includes facsimiles from Couperin's original edition of 1716.

26 See, for example, Elena Letnanova, Piano Interpretation in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (North Carolina: McFarland, 1991)Google Scholar; and Robert Donington, The Interpretation of Early Music (London: Faber & Faber, 1989)Google Scholar.

27 Sébastien de Brossard, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1703)Google Scholar; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: la veuve Duchesne, 1768)Google Scholar; Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt am Main: August Hermann, 1802)Google Scholar.

28 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Berlin: Georg Ludewig Winter, 1753)Google Scholar; English trans. by William Mitchell as Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (London: Eulenburg, 1949)Google Scholar: 161.

29 Türk, School of Clavier Playing, 337.

30 Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Bertrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel 1854)Google Scholar, English trans. Gustav Cohen as The Beautiful in Music (1891, reprint New York: The Liberal Arts, 1957)Google ScholarPubMed, and Geoffrey Payzant as On the Musically Beautiful (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986)Google Scholar. English translation of selected sections from the eighth edition of 1891 by Martin Cooper in Music in European Thought 1851–1912, ed. Bojan Bujić (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 12–39Google Scholar.

31 Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, trans. Martin Cooper in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 22.

32 See, for example, the writings of Jean-Baptiste DuBos, Réflection critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture (Paris, 1719) and Charles Batteaux, Les beaux-arts réduits à un meme principe (Paris, 1746)Google Scholar. Translations of selected sections from both texts appear in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, abridged ed., Peter le Huray and James Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 17–22, 31–47 respectively.

33 Hanslick in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 23.

34 One of the most important findings of recent research in the cognitive neuroscience of music is that, while systematically associated with language and other cognitive domains including vision, music also displays a neural architecture specific to itself and to our species. There appear to be neural pathways recruited only during musical experiences, supporting the hypothesis of a specifically musical way of engaging with music. See, for example, Isabelle Peretz, ‘Brain Specialization for Music: New Evidence from Congenital Amusia’, in The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, eds. Isabelle Peretz and Robert Zatorre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google ScholarPubMed, 192.

35 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google ScholarPubMed; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).

36 Jules Combarieu, for example, defined music as ‘l'art de penser avec des sons’ (‘the art of thinking in sounds’) in his La musique, ses lois, son evolution published in 1907 (Paris: Ernest Flammarion), 7; English translation in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 211.

37 le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 199.

38 Michaelis quoted in le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 200.

39 Michaelis quoted in le Huray and Day, Music and Aesthetics, 201.

40 Hanslick in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 20–21.

41 Goehr, Quest for Voice, 134.

42 Hanslick in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 37. Emphasis mine.

43 See, for example, Johann Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg: Herold, 1739)Google Scholar, English translation by Ernest C. Harriss as Johann Mattheson's ‘Der vollkommene Capellmeister’: A Revised Translation and Critical Commentary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Johann Philipp Kirnberger's Die Kunst des reinen Satzes in der Musik (Berlin, 1771–9), English translation of vol. 1 and the first part of vol. 2 by David Beach and Jürgen Thym as The Art of Strict Musical Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Heinrich Christoph Koch's Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition(Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1782–93), English translation of part i and ii by Nancy K. Baker as Introductory Essay on Composition: The Mechanical Rules of Melody, sections 3 and 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

44 Bujić, Music in European Thought, 1.

45 Ernest Renan quoted in Main Currents in Western Thought, ed. Franklin Le Van Baumer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar: 464.

46 Jean-Philippe Rameau, Génération harmonique (Paris: Prault fils, 1737)Google Scholar, English trans. as Harmonic Generation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974). See also Joel Lester, ‘Rameau and eighteenth-century harmonic theory’, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 753–777 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Fétis referred to the inherent melodic tendencies between the pitches as ‘the laws of tonality’. See Brian Hyer, ‘Tonality’, in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 726–52Google Scholar.

48 See his Cours complet d'harmonie et de composition (Paris: chez l'auteur, 1803–1806); he writes on page 47 that ‘the tonic is the centre of gravity, the goal of all goals, the end of all ends. It is to the tonic that the scepter of the musical empire is entrusted.’ Furthermore, he argues that ‘like the attraction recognized in physics in relation to the inertia of bodies, this attraction acts in inverse relation to distance: such that a tone that is only half step away from the one that needs to follow it is much more powerfully attracted by it than it would be if separated by a whole step. Here is a new analogy that I have discovered in nature, one that proves the marvelous harmony that reigns among things least resembling one another in appearance.’ Cours complet, 52. Translation mine.

49 Lotte Thaler, in Organische Form in der Musiktheorie des 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Katzbichler, 1984)Google Scholar associates the rise of dynamic music theories with organicist aesthetics, which in turn is related to developments in biology during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a discussion of the relationship between organicism and music theory, see John Neubauer, ‘Organicism and Music Theory’, in New Paths: Aspects of Music Theory and Aesthetics in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Darla Crispin, Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009): 11–35Google Scholar.

50 Neubauer, ‘Organicism and Music Theory’, 19.

51 See footnote 35.

52 Momigny, ‘Logique de la musique’, in Encyclopédie méthodique: musique, ed. Nicolas Etienne Framery, Pierre Louis Ginguené and Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny (Paris, 1791), vol. 2, 105. Translation mine. A similar theory of tonality was proposed by Fétis (see footnote 47), and the idea that the natural laws of human perception – particularly auditory perception – play the most significant part in the formation of the laws of the Western tonal system was corroborated by the leading tone-psychologist of the period, Hermann von Helmhotz, who wrote in his Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen of 1863 that ‘it is precisely the physiological part in especial – the theory of the sensations of hearing – to which the theory of music has to look for the foundation of its structure’, English trans. A. J. Ellis, quoted from Bujić, Music in European Thought, 283.

53 Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986)Google Scholar: 31.

54 While Lussy had substantial influence on his contemporaries, during the twentieth century his theories were overshadowed by the interest shown in Riemann's theories, on the one hand, and to those of Lussy's pupil Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, on the other hand. Riemann did not publicly acknowledge the influence of Lussy's theories on his own thinking, yet in a private communication with Lussy he wrote: ‘I do not hesitate in the least in granting you the honour for a very ingenious and scientific solution to the problem in question [problem of interpretation in performance].’ See, Mine Doğantan, Mathis Lussy: A Pioneer in Studies of Expressive Performance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002)Google Scholar: 140.

55 Mathis Lussy, Le rythme musical, 2. All translations from Lussy in this article are mine.

56 Eric Clarke, for example, writes that ‘there is no plausible alternative to the idea that expression [in performance] is derived from structure.’ See, Eric Clarke, ‘Generative Principles in Music Performance’, in Generative Processes in Music, ed. John Sloboda (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988)Google ScholarPubMed: 11.

57 Hanslick in Bujić, Music in European Thought, 22.

58 For full citations, see footnote 17, above.

59 Lussy did not claim that there is only one correct way of delivering any given passage of music. Although each kind of rhythmic-tonal structure implies a certain timing-dynamic profile in performance, these would be subject to variations in the hand of different performers, but would still retain their generic profile. Also, parameters such as touch, articulation and timbre would play a profound role in the emergence of different performance expressions through similar timing-dynamic profiles, an issue Lussy did not explore.

60 Mathis Lussy, ‘De la culture du sentiment musical’, Festschrift zum Zweiten Kongress der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft (Basel: Reinhardt, 1906)Google Scholar: 7.

61 Lussy, ‘De la culture du sentiment musical’, 10.

62 Lussy, Traité, 9.

63 Lussy, Traité, 8.

64 Lussy, L'anacrouse, 13.

65 Lussy, Le rythme, 15.

66 Lussy, Le rythme, 91.

67 Lussy, Traité, 117.

68 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 7.

69 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 29.

70 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 10.

71 Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny, La seul vrai théorie de la musique (Paris: chez l'auteur, 1821)Google Scholar. Facsimile edition (Geneva: Minkoff, 1980): 118–19.

72 Lussy, L'anacrouse, 17.

73 Lussy, L'anacrouse, 17.

74 Lussy, L'anacrouse, 16.

75 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 38.

76 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 37. Second italics in this sentence are mine.

77 Lussy, Traité, 117. Emphasis mine.

78 Luger Lohmann, ‘Hugo Riemann and the Development of Musical Performance Practice’, Proceedings of the Göteborg International Organ Academy 1994, ed. Hans Davidsson and Sverker Jullander (Göteborg: Göteborg University, 1995)Google Scholar: 263.

79 Hugo Riemann, System der musikalischen Rhythmik und Metrik (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1903): 14, quoted from Lohmann, ‘Hugo Riemann’, 263.

80 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 34.

81 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 34.

82 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 35, footnote 1.

83 Matthay, Musical Interpretation, 34. Matthay also notes that the practice of ‘phrasing’ applies not only to the shaping of the musical phrase but also to musical sense units of all sizes. He writes: ‘it really does not signify whether we consider the music unit to be a “motif,” “idea,” “section,” “phrase,” or “sentence.” All this is purely a matter of nomenclature, music terminology – a point of exceedingly small importance artistically. What does matter is that … Music units (or the more complex “phrase” or “sentence” organisms) are always in themselves again progressions towards definite landmarks.’ Musical Interpretation, 39.

84 Karakowski in Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin Pianist and Teacher: As Seen by His Pupils, trans. Naomi Shohet, Krysia Osostowicz and Roy Howat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar: 44.

85 For a discussion of why Lussy prefers respiration as a model over other physiological functions such as the processes of systole and diastole, see Mine Doğantan, Mathis Lussy, chapter 3.

86 R.H. Stetson, ‘A Motor Theory of Rhythm and Discrete Succession’, Psychological Review 12/4 (1905)Google Scholar: 315.

87 Liszt in Sachs, Virtuoso, 61. Another analogy that became popular in theories of performance after the mid-nineteenth century concerns the dynamics of the musical phrase and of bodies moving in physical space, the implication being that in good phrasing tones behave as if they are subject to the natural laws of physics. As tones are imagined to exist in a musical gravitational field and related through the forces of musical attractions, it is only logical that phrasing, which shapes the tones in accordance with their inherent directional tendencies, would be compared to the movement of physical bodies set in motion. Theorists who advocated this model during the late nineteenth century include: Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930), who is primarily known as the originator of the revival movement for Gregorian chant and for the restoration of the smooth, continuous quality of plainchant performance (see his Le nombre musical grégorien ou rythmique grégorienne, volume 1, Rome: Tournai, 1908). Mocquereau's model, which explains the dynamics of a rhythmic group or the musical phrase by reference to the behaviour of a ball that is thrown in the air and depicts a trajectory before falling on the ground (depicted also graphically by Mocquereau), is replicated in all its details – though without any acknowledgement – by Edward T. Cone in his influential Musical Form and Musical Performance of 1968), and by John Blackwood McEwen (1868–1948), a student of Matthay (see his The Thought in Music, London: Macmillan, 1912). There are visual representations of the dynamics of the musical phrase in Matthay as well (1913), a practice that has recently been revived in research concerning shaping music in performance, as in John Rink's notion of ‘intensity curve’, for example. See, John Rink, ‘Translating Musical Meaning: The Nineteenth-Century Performer as Narrator’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 217–238 Google ScholarPubMed.

88 Boris Berman, Notes From the Pianist's Bench (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar: 61.

89 Grigory Kogan quoted in Boris Berman, Notes, 140.

90 Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘This is Outstanding Playing of Poetic Sensibility: The Metaphor of Poetry in Journalistic Criticism’, paper presented at the SMA Study-day on Performance Criticism, London, IMR, Dec. 2009.

91 See, for example, Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Recording the Performer's Voice’, in Recorded Music: Philosophical and Critical Reflections, ed. Mine Doğantan-Dack (London: Middlesex University Press, 2008): 292–313Google Scholar; Mine Doğantan-Dack, ‘Practice-as-research in Music Performance’, in Sage Handbook of Digital Dissertations and Theses, ed. R. Andres, S. Boyd-David, E. Borg, M. Domingo and J.England, Sage, 2012.

92 Joseph Kerman, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985): 195–196 Google ScholarPubMed.