Peter Williams on recent books

How splendid that the Associated Board would do such a thing as publish in 2002 a new edition of The art of fugue! Any of us regretting the decline of music as a serious study in our universities – music as practical language, not chit-chat about it – must rejoice daily that at least the Associated Board can still be depended upon. And not only for a classic like The art of fugue but new presentations of other standard works (here, Mozart) and three new guides to issues in performance practice, an area of ever-increasing importance to thinking performers. Now that educational theorists, multiculturists, budget managers, New Thinkers, musicologists and assorted interferers have reduced Music A-level to being virtually meaningless as a basic training, the AB programme is left unrivalled as a planned scheme of musical learning and as an indicator of firststep musicianship.

It was typical of the later twentieth-century’s wrecking of such musicianship that the AB was said by one musicologist to ‘perpetrate a scheme of musical nonsense’ (J. Dunsby, in ed. H. Siegel: Schenker studies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), p.186). Presumably the remark was made in the interests of setting up some New Approach foreign to the AB tradition, which therefore had to be discredited. It’s the Viennese Guru Syndrome again: Freudians strive to discredit non-Freudians. But since many a teacher or admissions-tutor of British students is (as teachers of American students would be) only too happy to find that they have any AB training, preferably up to Grade VIII in theory as well as an instrument or two, I hope this remark remains as ineffectual as it is irresponsible.

Not that any of us would be without criticism or alternative suggestions for the AB scheme of study. For example, I am amazed and (to young learners) apologetic to read the kind of examinese prose-style still appearing in the Theory and even Aural exams. Also, there are probably few teachers or instructors who would not go about things somewhat differently, or choose different pieces here and there. Sight-reading exercises are particularly problematic. And of course, if you despise all types of compulsory or conventionalised learning, then the AB exams are not for you, and you can easily feel justified by pointing to composers today who know little and play worse.

But a live working in music with live young musicians compels one to recognise the care with which the whole Grade programme has been devised and revised, backed by an enlightened policy of publishing usable and authoritative editions and guide books. How much more has been owed by fine musicians to Tovey’s Beethoven volumes than to anything ever written in books of critical essays or Viennese analysis. The present volumes are part of the broader AB programme and are a credit to it: how wonderful if any of them were ever made a set work for A-level or Music 201!

In preparing the Eulenburg Pocket Score of The art of fugue a quarter of a century ago (incidentally, the third edition made in Edinburgh), I began to feel that even grasping what the problems were in editing it, let alone in solving them, was almost impossibly taxing. Since then, the massive three-volume New Bach Edition by Klaus Hofmann (NBA VIII.2) has lightened the burden somewhat, so that a new English edition summarising researches and presenting the music in a practical keyboard score is bound to be useful to any musician ‘desirous of learning’.

Though the NBA is not mentioned, Richard Jones has absorbed a great deal of the recent and current thinking about this uniquely complicated compendium of fugues and canons, and gives fourteen fugues, i.e. Contrapunctus I–XIV, and four canons. The edition is a handsome and spacious two-stave version easy to read, and ably summarises the received history of the work, adding two commentaries for each piece: Textual Notes and, more fully, Analytical Notes. These last are of the refreshingly traditional AB kind, and I hope their abbreviations don’t disccourage the student. Although practical suggestions of the Tovey sort are no longer part of such an edition, the discussions are instructive, and no.8 is reprinted with indications of what is happening in the counterpoint.

Players will find it best to pull off the glued-in double CD at the end as they place the book on their music-desks and surrender themselves to this uncanny, transcendental music. Playing these pieces is like reading the greatest philosophers: despite their reputation, everything is so unexpectedly and delightfully straightforward, seldom fearsomely hard, never obscure. The sweetness of expression can even make one forget that Sebastian had more than a touch of the pedant about him. In their original form, the autograph’s opening four fugues (= nos.1, 3, 2, 5 here, but with differences) make a sequence of calm, masterful, singing counterpoint unmatched even by Byrd.

Despite the work’s reputation as being both sacred and obscure (the two go together), it is, in fact, neither – a message which this AB edition might well succeed in getting over to teachers and pupils. Piano teachers afraid to touch such ‘harpsichord music’ would do well to remember Tovey’s typically intimate observation on The art of fugue (‘typically intimate’ because as a counterpoint-teacher he knew that not the least difficulty in writing a good fugue is to keep it playable by two hands): that whatever else the composer was attempting with such music, it remains playable by eight fingers and two thumbs. (Well, at least playable by his large hands.)

Some questions remain. Did Bach call it the ‘Art of Fugue’, and each fugue ‘contrapunctus’? Was the Obituary muddled in mentioning a missing four-part rectus/inversus fugue? Was there really any significance in fourteen movements (14 = BACH)? In what respects is it keyboard music? How much of the story of the ‘chorale dictated in his blindness’ can we believe? And why is it missing from this edition? – nothing in the original print says it is organ music. Was the whole work moving towards one ‘finalised version’, or was it a changing, organic thing represented fully by neither the extant autographs nor the posthumous edition? There is a lot to be said for presenting The art of fugue in the composer’s most complete form as now known, and putting everything else, including the additional movements, the variants, the duets (not included in this edition) and the chorale, in an appendix. Any other way supposes more authority for the posthumous print than is really demonstrable.

Another question is: what exactly are the book’s new CDs for? Are they part of the edition – an authoritative performance, an ideal, an inspiration, or a hypothetical realisation of what the blurb claims to have ‘long been considered a non-keyboard work’? There would be a problem with any of these answers. Recorded on a ‘German-style instrument’, they realise the edition, thus allowing the last fugue, though incomplete, to be followed by the canons. The recording is close, and the playing, though more expressive than was usual half a century ago, is rather too obtrusively articulated to serve as a model. The main beats seem to me over-prominent for such counterpoint, reminding one of Mozart’s criticism of Thomas Attwood’s fussy part-writing: non e cantabile.

Speaking of whom, Richard Jones’s second volume is also to be welcomed as an inexpensive, well-informed presentation of Mozart’s piano pieces other than the sonatas, variations and juvenilia (or ‘immature’ pieces – ‘mature’ in the title is distinctly odd, but what else could one use?). The eighteen pieces are newly edited from the sources, and range from the Contredanses K.269 to a pair of movements in that strange, sweet (sickly sweet?) idiom of late Mozart, the Andante and Adagio K.616 and 617a. Included therefore are the two best-known fantasias, plus the Rondos in A minor and D major, the B minor Adagio, and the C major suite. Works playable only as duets, even if not so called, are excluded.

Brief notes to each piece say what one needs to know about its source, history and text-details, making a first-rate introduction for Students Of Any Age. Added fingering is sparse but always worth considering, though I suspect it is often more sophisticated than appropriate, e.g. in sequences, which must often have kept the same fingering whatever the configuration of sharps and naturals. The spacious appearance on the page and, where possible, convenient page-turns add to the value of a volume deserving to be in every Grade VIII student’s library. The AB would surely do itself a good turn if it always advertised its other books in such volumes. For not all the pieces here are good (if you think Mozart never put a foot wrong, play through the awful Suite K.399 or Fugue K.394), and sometimes when playing, one’s mind drifts to wondering what Haydn is available in the same imprint.

The AB’s Performer’s Guides are an inspired attempt to move with the times: to ‘help students and their teachers to achieve stylish performances’ and ‘add to the knowledge of amateur and professional musicians and music lovers’, by presenting in each volume eight essays from experts in their field, plus general introductions and a CD made up from previous recordings, some by contributors to the volumes. Would that students and teachers really read books sentence by sentence! The essays are written in a lively style (the opposite of what I was grumbling about above), learning is worn fairly lightly, and notes on the CDs direct the listeners’ attention to particular points as they listen. Ideally, one might wish for translations to the texts of the vocal examples and a few more musical scores for the CDs, so that one could follow more of the points being made. But for size, cost, approach, coverage, manner and kinds of illustration (musical examples, pictures, facsimiles, recordings) I find it hard to imagine how the student’s innate reluctance to study could be better challenged.

Questions arising are really questions about performance practice aims in general. Thus, while it is true that ‘you should be careful not to apply florid ornamentation to the wrong type’ of violin music, the topic requires such specialist knowledge and technical ability that only at an advanced level can the matter arise at all. Or take the use of documentary evidence, such as that concerning Bach’s fingering: that can have come from someone observing him only from the age of forty or so, so how do we know it bears on his much earlier music? Did he not change? Does his music not?

Documentary evidence always needs an analysis of the agenda under which it was written, i.e. a touch of deconstruction. Moreover, there is a huge leap from any evidence to its application. If some written advice seems to tell us exactly what to do, we are probably misunderstanding it in some way. If a CD shows us how old pianists did not get their hands together, are we to copy them? If so, where? If X says play rubato this or that way, what particular genres of music was he thinking of, and to what level of performer was he addressing his remarks?

Too positivistic an approach can also be misleading when it concerns ‘reliable’ editions of music: ‘to respect the composer’s intent’ sounds admirable but too many questions are begged once one gets down to specifics, and the student should not be given the impression that a clean Urtext necessarily conveys the composer’s intent at all, let alone so much better than a nineteenth-century edition full of ‘editorial additions’. Important too, for students using such volumes as a textbook, is that the examples don’t merely cover the standard ideas of music’s history but are exciting and delightful in themselves. I found many of the first volume’s CD dull, despite the exquisite Cima Sonata, and how the third volume could pay so little attention to Wagner is a real puzzle.

As the CDs derive largely from British recordings, I would be sorry if AB students got the idea that historically informed performance was mostly in the hands of our compatriots, or that they were always the best or even only experts. Fortunately, though, the text of all three volumes focuses on the great composers and is mercifully free of the CPE Bachs and Dusseks of each period: the one bit of Clementi soon had me reaching for the fast-forward button.

The point in all this, however, is that in these publications, the Associated Board seems set to be the upholder of that intimacy of musical learning and musical experience that was once the aim of secondary and tertiary education in general but which has been ousted by the marginal and downright irrelevant. I mean particularly the kind of university music that has become a series of watered-down modules (what a word!) for over-large crowds of young people ill-trained and thus impoverished by ‘the new aims in music education’, as apologists call them. With luck, university courses run by musicians who know a #6/4/3 from a Schenker graph will benefit from these various publications and use them as set works, for there must still be somewhere, thanks to the AB, students interested in understanding the language of western music from the inside.