SCORE-READING
SCORE-READING
A few of you have apologized privately to me for the limited state of your musical expertise, especially in the domain of reading music. These confessions have set me thinking about the role that musical literacy actually played in the writings on Western art music—a written musical tradition—that you will be reading in the coming weeks.
All of the writers in question were (or are) professional men of music. The adjacency of the two terms “professional” and “men” here is not a mere happenstance. Although music-making of a kind that required musical literacy—especially piano playing—spread rapidly and widely through middle-class Europe during the nineteenth century, and although woman played a dominating role in both the performance and the ethos connected with this movement, women music-makers during this century were overwhelmingly amateurs. Their musical domain was the home. The critics whose ideas about music found their way into print were overwhelmingly men with a professional expertise in music. Their professions required of them a highly developed ability to read scores: composers, conductors, analysts.
This ability had a practical importance to critics in the 19th century, when a score was sometimes easier to come by than a live performance, and when opportunities to rehear the music of a performance could be very scarce. If a critic could put his hands on a score, and if he could decipher that score, he had a lasting, albeit abstract, foundation on which to build and test his written observations.
On the other hand, scores could be difficult to come by, especially if the music in question was written for an orchestra. Orchestral scores were expensive to publish and had a limited public. (Orchestral players themselves, of course, performed from parts, not from scores.) Far more common were reductions of orchestral works for 2- or 4-hand piano. Many amateurs could indeed perform such reductions; it was precisely for amateurs that such reductions were printed. And the availability of such playable reductions gave critics something akin to today’s recordings: a way to re-hear previous music. But obviously such reductions could not convey more than a portion of an original orchestral experience. To use them effectively as a basis for writing criticism, a critic needed either to have listened carefully at some earlier time to a full orchestral performance of a piece; to possess an exceptional ability to imagine the full range of effects to which a piano reduction pointed; or both.
But even when a writer had everything possible that could put a given piece of music in his ears—a carefully observed performance and an adequate score—questions still arise about the relationship between the critic’s literacy in music and his effectiveness as a critic. In what ways, and to what extent, did his ability to read music serve his writing about music? And above all, to what extent did the most effective aspects of his writing depend on musical literacy?
In the weeks to come, I hope you will give some attention to specific ways in which score-reading played a role in the criticisms you read. You could start by asking yourself, for example, whether the questions that seem to interest a given writer most passionately are in fact questions that require attention to a score; and whether the ability to read a score in fact provides a given writer with a useful authority in an exploration of issues that are not related to the score. To these two questions, I suspect you will be able to add many others of your own.
A few of you have apologized privately to me for the limited state of your musical expertise, especially in the domain of reading music. These confessions have set me thinking about the role that musical literacy actually played in the writings on Western art music—a written musical tradition—that you will be reading in the coming weeks.
All of the writers in question were (or are) professional men of music. The adjacency of the two terms “professional” and “men” here is not a mere happenstance. Although music-making of a kind that required musical literacy—especially piano playing—spread rapidly and widely through middle-class Europe during the nineteenth century, and although woman played a dominating role in both the performance and the ethos connected with this movement, women music-makers during this century were overwhelmingly amateurs. Their musical domain was the home. The critics whose ideas about music found their way into print were overwhelmingly men with a professional expertise in music. Their professions required of them a highly developed ability to read scores: composers, conductors, analysts.
This ability had a practical importance to critics in the 19th century, when a score was sometimes easier to come by than a live performance, and when opportunities to rehear the music of a performance could be very scarce. If a critic could put his hands on a score, and if he could decipher that score, he had a lasting, albeit abstract, foundation on which to build and test his written observations.
On the other hand, scores could be difficult to come by, especially if the music in question was written for an orchestra. Orchestral scores were expensive to publish and had a limited public. (Orchestral players themselves, of course, performed from parts, not from scores.) Far more common were reductions of orchestral works for 2- or 4-hand piano. Many amateurs could indeed perform such reductions; it was precisely for amateurs that such reductions were printed. And the availability of such playable reductions gave critics something akin to today’s recordings: a way to re-hear previous music. But obviously such reductions could not convey more than a portion of an original orchestral experience. To use them effectively as a basis for writing criticism, a critic needed either to have listened carefully at some earlier time to a full orchestral performance of a piece; to possess an exceptional ability to imagine the full range of effects to which a piano reduction pointed; or both.
But even when a writer had everything possible that could put a given piece of music in his ears—a carefully observed performance and an adequate score—questions still arise about the relationship between the critic’s literacy in music and his effectiveness as a critic. In what ways, and to what extent, did his ability to read music serve his writing about music? And above all, to what extent did the most effective aspects of his writing depend on musical literacy?
In the weeks to come, I hope you will give some attention to specific ways in which score-reading played a role in the criticisms you read. You could start by asking yourself, for example, whether the questions that seem to interest a given writer most passionately are in fact questions that require attention to a score; and whether the ability to read a score in fact provides a given writer with a useful authority in an exploration of issues that are not related to the score. To these two questions, I suspect you will be able to add many others of your own.
posted by Rose Rosengard Subotnik at 11:32 PM
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