At the Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces

NICHOLAS COOK

AT THE BORDERS OF MUSICAL IDENTITY: SCHENKER, CORELLI AND THE GRACES

The first edition of Corelli’s Twelve Sonatas for Violin Op. 5 was dedicated to Sophia Charlotte, Princess of Hanover, and the dedication is dated January 1 st, 1700; it would be hard to think of a more appropriate symbol of the work’s significance in the history of violin music. l It was engraved in the conventional format for solo sonatas, with one stave for the solo instrument and another for the basso continua. It goes without saying that the basso continua part was to be realised rather than performed literally (though how this was to be done and who it was to be done by remains a matter of some controversy).2 And equally it went without saying that the soloist should elaborate what was written in his or her part. As is well known, the slow movements of Op. 5 are little more than skeletons intended to be fleshed out by means of improvised - or at any rate improvisatory - ornamentation. Such radically free ornamentation, which at times trespasses onto what would in other countries have been seen as the domain of composition, was common practice in Italian music of the late baroque; it constituted part of the player’s competence. Outside Italy, however, the tradition of free ornamentation on which Corelli’s short-hand notation re- lied was less securely established. Presumably it was for this reason - and more generally to accommodate amateurs - that, some ten years later, an edition of Corelli’s Op. 5 was issued by a number of North European publishers in which an extra stave was added to the slow movements of the first six sonatas, con- taining an ornamented version of the solo line.3

According to the publishers, these ornamentations - or ‘graces’, as the Eng- lish edition called them - were ‘composez par Mr. A. Corelli comme il les joue’. Doubts as to the truth of this claim must have been voiced from the outset, however, for one of the publishers (Roger of Amsterdam) felt it necessary to state in a catalogue dating from 17 16 that ‘ceux qui seront curieux de voir l’original de Mr. Corelli avec ses lettres ecrittes a ce sujet, les peuvent voir chez Estienne Roger’.4 Despite this, however, the doubts have persisted. In 1728 Roger North questioned the authenticity of the ornamentations, commenting that ‘any one would wonder how so much vermin could creep into the work of such a master’; on the other hand Quantz, writing two decades later, accepted them without demur.5 But the weight of each of these eighteenth-century judgements is diminished by its author’s nationality. In his 1834 treatise L’Art du violon Pierre Baillot appears to have assumed that the graces were authentic,

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and so did Chrysander in the preface to his edition of Op. 5. And in the present century the same assumption has been made by Pincherle, Boyden, Stowell, Rangel-Ribeiro, and most recently Neal Zaslaw.6 On the other hand Doning- ton, Bukofzer and Neumann think otherwise (mainly, it appears, because they do not consider them good enough to be Corelli’s).7 It is not my purpose in this article to add to the controversy. All that really matters in the present context is that, in Neumann’s words, the graces ‘certainly document someone’s practice in the first years of the 18th century’.* For convenience, though, I shall continue to refer to them as Corelli’s.

The concept of ornamentation is central to the Schenkerian approach to musical structure; one might reasonably say that Schenker’s principal theoretical achievement lay in his transference of the idea of ornamentation from its established application at the musical surface to an underlying level. And Schen- ker’s first major theoretical work was his Contribution to the Study of Ornamen- tation, subtitled ‘An Introduction to the KeyboardWorks of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’.9 By Bach’s time, however, free ornamentation in the Italian style had given way to the systematic codification of ornaments and to a higher degree of compositional specification; Schenker seems never to have turned his mind to the kind of free ornamentation represented by Corelli’s graces, or the graces which many other composers and performers added to his violin sonatas.‘O In some ways this is surprising, for Christopher Wintle has demonstrated that ‘every one of [Schenker’s] most important concepts can be rediscovered through the Italian instrumental music of the late seventeenth century’, and that of Corelli in particular.” Wintle is not simply showing that Corelli’s music, almost completely ignored in Schenker’s writings, is nonetheless susceptible to Schenkerian analysis. He is showing that it is quite explicitly and even obviously constructed out of a limited range of linear-harmonic formulae or ‘models’, which correspond more or less directly to the Schenkerian Ursatz and are transformed in very much the manner of Schenkerian theory; you cannot help wondering whether it might not have been from Corelli’s music that Schenker derived his idiosyncratic but central idea of the tonal archetype. But whereas the formations and transformations with which Wintle is concerned involve temporal displacement and expansion, and are thus emblematic of the Schen- kerian middleground, this is not the case of the often elaborate ornamentation of the graces. This sounds like a way of saying that the graces are purely phenomena of the musical surface, which in an obvious sense they are: they play, if you like, a purely supplementary role in relation to Corelli’s original score. And the deconstructionist connotations of this term are not out of place. For, as we shall see, the comfortable assumption of a neatly ordered hierarchy, in which improvisatory graces are supported by a stable compositional structure, re- peatedly breaks down under the weight and variety of the ornamented and otherwise altered versions in which Corelli’s Op. 5 has been transmitted.

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The issue with which I shall be primarily concerned is not whether or not Schenkerian or other hierarchical approaches to analysis can be usefully applied to Corelli’s graces (I hope to demonstrate that they can). It is rather an ontological one. When, in analysis or everyday discourse, we talk about works or pieces of music we do not mean to say that what is heard or played is identical each time. We accept that some variance is built into the concept of musical identity, most obviously in terms of performance (and in this article I am treat- ing the notated variance of the graces as a kind of surrogate for the unnotated variance of performance). In effect, we assume that certain features of the music are essential in terms of its identity (change these features and it is no longer ‘the same’ music), while others are not. If we ask just which features are essential and which are not, however, we find that the answer is not as obvious as might have been expected. Nelson Goodman’s notorious solution to this problem, that anything which is explicitly notated is essential and that everything else is not,12 is as empirically indefensible as it is logically impregnable; it would mean that no graced version of Op. 5 could be regarded as a version of Op. 5 at all. (Not to put too fine a point on it, Goodman’s theory is incompat- ible with how anybody except Goodman talks about music.) But what is the alternative? To a music theorist, at least, the issue might seem amenable to a structuralist approach: we would say that the graces are optional and variable because they are purely surface events, carrying no structural implications, and we would in this way identify the essential with the structural. But of course this model will become problematic if, as I have suggested, the graces subvert the assumption on which it is based: that of a neatly ordered hierarchy from the structural to the non-structural, the essential to the non-essential. Under such circumstances there is a danger of finding ourselves in the uncomfortable situation of theorising without being able to say just what it is that we are theorising about.

In this way the challenge is one of finding a way between Scylla and Charyb- dis. On the one hand there is a monolithic conception of the musical work as some kind of stable, imaginary object - a conception which reduces all performance variance (notated or otherwise) to the status of the inessential. On the other, there is a radical situationalism that sees every performance as an individual, thereby denying the perception that music remains in some important sense ‘the same’ from one performance to another. In short, we need an approach that recognises the cultural salience of both the variant and the invariant. And by proposing a looser model of musical identity that mediates between these extremes, I hope to nudge theory towards more adequate en- gagement with an aspect of music from which it has in the past conspicuously swerved away. While the ostensible topic of this article is the plurality of notated versions of Corelli’s Op. 5, its real purpose is to suggest a framework for analysing the non-notated variance of music in performance.

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I

At first glance, then, it is easy to see how the kind of free ornamentation found in Corelli’s graces might be accommodated within a more or less Schenkerian framework. We would understand the graces as elaborating the original version of Op. 5 in much the same way that any musical surface elaborates its underlying structure (although, as I said, without the element of temporal displacement). In other words, we would expect graces to project underlying structure. And this is just the kind of relationship that Stephen Hefling has observed in the written-out Adagio which Quantz included in his l&such of 1752,13 and which includes not just ornamentation but dynamic indications; ‘the correla- tion between Quantz’s ornamentation and dynamics and the linear analysis of his piece is too striking to be dismissed’, writes Hefling,14 despite the apparent anachronism of using an early twentieth-century analytical method to explain eighteenth-century performance practice. In his article he illustrates any number of cases where Quantz’s performing version emphasises structural notes at the expense of non-structural ones and so ‘underscores’, to use Hefling’s word, the boundary points of linear progressions or unfoldings. In this way, he says (referring specifically to bar 6 of Quantz’s example), the ornamentation and dynamics ‘aid the audible comprehension of structural levels, even though the complexity of the graces might at first seem to preclude any such possibility’.i5

What Hefling is suggesting, then, is that in order to make sense of the thicket of notes found in a graced score one needs to relate the graces not simply to the original music, but to the underlying structure of that music. (It should logically follow - and this is an idea that will recur throughout this article - that the graces, if read properly, will reveal a structural interpretation of the original, that is, an analysis.) And the principles he adumbrates transfer readily enough to Corelli’s graces. Ex. 1 shows excerpts from the original version of the opening Adagio from Corelli’s Op. 5 No. 3, aligned not only with the 1710 ornamented version but also, by way of comparison, with a transcription of the same piece for recorder which was published in 1707 by Walsh of London and ‘Illustrated throughout’ (as an advertisement in the Post Man put it) ‘with proper Graces, by an eminent Master’. l6

Despite the difference of instrumental medium, both Corelli’s and Walsh’s versions create an effect of luxuriance, to borrow Neumann’s pejorative term. (Neal Zaslaw has pointed out how Corelli’s graces involve a minimum of shift- ing, thereby creating the maximum effect with the least effort. 17) All the same, both versions conform to one of the basic principles that Quantz lays down for this kind of free ornamentation, namely that ‘if . . . you want to add several notes here and there in the melody, you must never do so in excess, lest the principal notes be obscured, and the plain air made unrecognisable’.‘* Virtu- ally every note of the original appears in both the ornamented versions. And it

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Ex. 1 Op. 5 No. 3, first movement (a) Bars l-10

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(b) Bars 12-14

(c) Bars 17-19

is not too difficult to relate the graces to the music’s underlying structure in the same way as Hefling does. Both the Corelli and Walsh versions, for instance, use anticipatory flurries of notes to highlight the initial ascent from c2 to the primary note, e2 (3), in bars l-2. In the 1710 version these flurries recur in almost identical form when the entire passage is repeated in the dominant from bar 5, despite the fact that in Schenkerian terms the corresponding progression from g2 to b2 has a purely local significance. Walsh’s ‘eminent Master’, by contrast, de-emphasises the progression on the repeat by attenuating or omitting the elaborations; this is just the kind of ‘underscoring’ of structure that Hefling leads us to expect, in effect parsing Corelli’s original in such a way as to bring out what is more and what is less important. On the other hand, it is Corelli’s graced version that introduces its highest note, c3, at bar 18, as it were announcing the final appearance of 3 before it falls to 2 at bar 19 - the critical point in the musical process, as seen in Schenkerian terms. l9 This time Walsh’s ‘eminent Master’ does nothing to mark the occasion.

Seen this way, the ornamented surface can make explicit the structure that, in the original version, is no more than implied, and this is entirely compatible with the standard Schenkerian conception of the relationship between structural levels. (It is as much as to say that both Corelli and the ‘eminent Master’

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have in effect superimposed a new surface onto the 1700 score.) And such examples could easily be multiplied. More challenging, however, is the possibility of advancing the same principle at the level of large-scale form.The original version of the Op. 5 No. 3 movement is divided by a series of intermediate cadences (in G major at bar 10, A minor at 13 and E minor at 15, each marked by a trill in the Walsh version), but there is at first sight no clear hierarchy between them. Analysis, however, suggests an implicit binary form, most readily visible in the c2-d2-e2 ascents that underlie bars 1-2 and 13-14. (The 8, once resumed at bar 14, remains strongly in evidence until the 2 in bar 19.) And it is this implication that is brought out in Corelli’s ornamented version: the similarity of the graces in bars l-2 and 13-14 establishes a correspondence between the two passages that is immediately visible on the printed page, and which one might reasonably expect to be translated into a correspondence of performance gesture. In this way an underlying segmentation that is at best implicit in the original version is rendered explicit at the musical surface; as Hefling says, far from disguising the structure of the original, such ornamentation clarifies it. But the same cannot be said of the Walsh version. By comparison, its graces tend to elaborate each figure as it comes, almost one note at a time, rather than interpreting it in the light of the structural context in which it occurs; there is less of the bold structural sweep of Corelli’s linear flourishes, resulting in a more decorative but less compositional quality.20 Paradoxically, it is bars 8-9 of Corelli’s version, where the ornamentation almost completely drops out, that make the point most tellingly; there is nothing in Walsh’s master’s graces to compare with this understated treatment, which brings a reflec- tive, summarising quality to the cadence onto the dominant (linking, perhaps, with the lack of essential bass motion at this point).2’

As I mentioned, many composers and performers wrote ornamented versions of Corelli’s sonatas, and among those whose versions survive is Gemini- ani. His performing version of Op. 5 No. 9 was published in Sir John Hawkins’s General History of the Science and Practice of Music,22 and the first section of its opening Largo is given in Ex. 2a. 23 Here the ornamentation is different in nature from the Corelli examples I have described, reflecting not only stylistic differences between the two composer-performers (as Peter Walls has pointed out, Geminiani’s graces tend to be less linear and more harmonic than Corel- li’s24), but also the structural characteristics of Corelli’s original movement. For whereas in the Adagio of Op. 5 No. 3 the binary organisation of the music is at most implicit in the original version, the opening movement of No. 9 is explicitly divided into two sections, each of which is marked with repeat signs. And within each section there is a great deal of repetition; for instance, there is a sequence at bars 63-72 and 73-82, while bars 17 ‘--202 are a transposed repetition of bars 63-94 - and are themselves immediately repeated. (These repetitions are shown in Ex. 2b, aligned with the corresponding passage from Ex.


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Ex. 2 Op. 5 No. 9, first movement (a) Bars l-9

Preludm

(b) Bars 17-23

I 7 6

m

6 7 * 7 :

2a.) In short, the movement as Corelli wrote it wears its structure on its sleeve. Perhaps it is only to be expected, then, that the function of the ornamentation is less one of articulation than of enrichment; Geminiani uses the notes of Corelli’s original (except a few which he omits, and to which I shall return) in


SCHENKER,~ORELLIANDTHE GRACES 187

order to support a more opulent fabric. But it is not just a question of there being more notes. One the main principles according to which Geminiani en- riches Corelli’s original is that where Corelli repeats, Geminiani varies; this applies to the large-scale repetitions I have already mentioned (Ex. 2b), as well as to smaller sequential repetitions such as bars 63-72 and 73-82. Even a detail like Geminiani’s addition of an ftt2 in bar 2 could be seen as adding to the motivic depth of the music, linking with the e2 of bar 3l to create a stepwise descent from 8 down to the i of the cadence at bar 43 - and scalar descents from 8 to i are a repeated feature of the final seven bars of the movement.

Both Corelli and Geminiani have so designed their graces, then, as to complement the nature of the original movement: a movement that lacks structural articulation is given formal clarification through the imposition of surface repetition, while a movement that is already clearly articulated is enriched through variation and motivic inter-relation. (It seems, then, as if the relationships between underlying structure and surface may embrace not only projection, which is a form of similarity, but also its opposite, for complementation is based on difference.) Unlike Corelli, however, Geminiani did not limit himself to providing elaborated versions of the slow movements from Op. 5; Ex. 3a shows the beginning of his version of the final movement from Op. 5 No. 9. Although he retains the linear and harmonic framework of Corelli’s music virtually unchanged, the effect is strikingly different: he has clothed what Corelli wrote in a thematic garb that is quite new. The immediate consequence is to create a one-bar periodicity that is altogether absent from Corelli’s melodic line. But Geminiani couples this thematic treatment with the variation principle we saw in the opening Large in such a way as to change the overall character and structure of the movement. For example, he returns to his opening triplet-and-quavers rhythm after the double bar-line; this integrates the first section of the second half (bars 21-6) into the larger structure of the movement in a way that does not happen in the original. Six bars later he reintro- duces his original melodic figure in a slightly varied form, which corresponds to the modified return of the opening pattern in Corelli’s version.25 But whereas Corelli then has eight bars based on this pattern, leading to a complete and literal repeat of the entire first part of the movement, Geminiani progressively liquidates his theme until all that is left is triple-stopped chords with a moving inner part (Ex. 3b). In this way Geminiani translates Corelli’s essentially symmetrical design into an ongoing, developmental progression towards the conclusion of the sonata as a whole, giving it a rhetorical and climactic quality that is quite foreign to the original conception. Paradoxically, the new surface en- dows the music with a new structure. It is less a matter of complementation than of aesthetic transformation.

It is possible in this way to establish a continuum of relationships between original and elaborated versions of Op. 5 that ranges from straightforward

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Ex. 3 Op. 5 No. 9, fourth movement (a) Bars l-4

Tempo di Gavotta Allegro

56 4 656 9 665 61

(b) Bars 51-4

Geminiani

6 5 6 : 6 5 7 6 6 6 # 5 5 5

implication-realisation to wholesale transformation.There is however a class of variants that does not easily fit into this continuum, as exemplified by Gemini- ani’s version of the Gigu from Op. 5 No. 9. Ex. 4 shows a short passage from this movement which is representative of the whole. Here little structural interpretation is involved; if Corelli repeats a passage, then with few exceptions Geminiani repeats whatever he has written too. And a linear-harmonic reduction would reveal very little difference between the two versions. In this way the reinterpretation remains firmly on the surface; Geminiani will have a broken chord where Corelli has an arpeggio, or a rising arpeggio where Corelli has a falling one, or he will replace Corelli’s arpeggio with a passing-note pattern. Nor is it necessarily a question of Geminiani elaborating what Corelli has written in any accepted sense of the term; sometimes there are more notes in Corelli’s version than there are in Geminiani’s (thirty-six as against thirty, to be precise, in Ex. 4). Here, in short, we cannot think of Geminiani’s version as a performing version of Corelli’s; Corelli’s original is just as suitable for performance, in a way that the slow movements from Op. 5 are not. What, then, is the point of Geminiani’s changes? Presumably the point is simply that the new version is different from the old one so that, as Marx puts it, it gives the listener ‘the thrill of the new, the not yet experienced, which he expected even from a performance of older music’.26 And in such cases a theoretical vocabulary en-

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Ex. 4 Op. 5 No. 9, second movement, bars 8-10 8

Geminiani

6 7 R’

6 6

compassing such terms as implication, realisation and transformation - the kind of vocabulary that is supported by hierarchical models of music - goes wide of the mark. We are dealing with a much simpler principle, though one which (as we shall see) creates its own problems for music theory: the principle of alternativity, or that one thing will do as well as another.

II

It is not only performers (or composer-performers, like Geminiani and Corelli himself) who brought the ‘thrill of the new’ to Op. 5. The same can be said of the many arrangements of Op. 5 for instruments other than solo violin, of which I shall discuss two representative examples. One we have already en- countered: the version of Op. 5 No. 3 for recorder bywalsh’s ‘eminent Master’. The second movement of this sonata offers a particularly clear illustration of the manner in which changing the medium can lead to a fundamental transformation of the music’s nature, as well as expressing the national characteristics and compositional qualities of the arranger. The original movement is a fugal Allegro in the Italian style (Ex. 5), and the recorder arrangement of it can be instructively compared with Geminiani’s arrangement of the sonata as a concerto grosso, which dates from 1 726.27

As might be expected, the recorder version of this movement has a generally higher tessitura than the original. The recorder’s ascent to c3 in bar 4 (Ex. 6a) opens up a register which appears only once in Corelli’s original movement but is featured throughout the recorder version; indeed it is at this register that the recorder version ends. But what is perhaps of greater stylistic significance is the tendency for the characteristically angular contours of Corelli’s melodic line to be ironed out in the recorder version, as a result of the recorder’s inability to play notes lower than f’. (Ex. 6d shows an example of this.) There is also a similar tendency for contrasts to be diminished in the rhythmic domain, and here the explanation lies in the violin’s double stops. An example of this is bars 9-12 where, as Ex. 6b shows, Walsh’s master arpeggiates the notes that were originally double-stopped; this preserves something of the harmonic and con-


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Ex. 5 Op. 5 No. 3, second movement

6; 6 “z 67 93 6 7

7 6 # 6 ;6;6 ;67

7 77 7 7 77 6 66 3 5 3

trapuntal fullness of the original, but results in a relatively undifferentiated stream of semiquavers as compared to Corelli’s solo line. Consequently the strongly-projected rhythmic motives of the original are more or less subsumed within the semiquaver figuration, so that the passage becomes essentially deco-

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Ex. 5 (cont.)

5 6 56S6

rative in effect. An even more striking instance is bars 17-23 (Ex. 6~). Corelli has a clear structural division half way through bar 2 1; the violin’s semiquavers mark the beginning of an episode that is quite different in character from anything that has come before. But the double stops of the violin version lead


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Ex. 6 Recorder arrangement of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement (a) Bars l-6

AllegrO

(b) Bars 9-l 2

567 6 6 67 6 5

(c) Bars 17-23 17

56 6 3 5

(d) Bars 28-32 29

6 7 a 6 5 646 4 6 3# 2 2

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SCHENKER,~ORELLI ANDTHEGRACES 193

Walsh’s master to overlay this structural division with continuous semiquaver passagework. And again the result is that Corelli’s energetic and strongly- articulated music turns into something closer to a decorative display-piece. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the recorder’s limited capacity for dynamic articulation and attack as compared to the violin.

Like the arrangement for recorder, Geminiani’s arrangement of the movement as a concerto gross0 irons out many of the registral contrasts in Corelli’s melodic line. But here the reason is different. Geminiani splits up Corelli’s compound melodies into their various components, and assigns each of these components to a separate instrumental line. Ex. 7a shows an example of this: in bar 14 the second concertino violin takes the g#‘--a’--g#’ of Corelli’s solo line, while the b appears in the first concertino violin and is transposed up an octave. Now this transposition is not something that is forced by the change in medium; Geminiani could perfectly well have retained Corelli’s original melodic line and had the g#‘-a’--g#’ in the first violin, bringing in the b in the second violin at the original register. In other words the transposition, which results in the elimination of the leap from a to e2 that appears in Corelli’s version, represents a stylistic choice. Geminiani’s general policy is to diminish the registral contrast of Corelli’s solo line and instead use instrumentation as a means of articulating the music’s contrapuntal and formal structure, and a particularly clear illustration of this is Ex. 7b.

Bar 31 is an important structural point; it represents the beginning of the final group of fugal entries. Corelli marks this point in the violin part by means of both the quadruple stopping at the preceding cadence, and extreme registral contrast. On the other hand he disguises the fugal subject itself; only at the next entry, in the following bar, does it appear in the original form.This means that though bar 3 1 is clearly projected as a point of articulation, it is not immediately obvious that it represents the final group of entries; this emerges in the course of the ensuing entries. Geminiani, however, handles all this quite differ- ently. As Ex. 7b shows, he marks bar 3 1 by having all the instruments drop out, apart from the two concertino violins (the second violin takes the original bass

Ex. 7 Geminiani, arrangement of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement (a) Bars 13-l 5

VI. I del Concertino

VI. II del Concenino

VC. del Concenino


194

Ex. 7 (b) Bars 28-40

NICHOLAS COOK

VI. I del

VI. II del COIlCCllillO

VI. In &I Concertino

Violin0 I

Violin0 n

Viola

Violoncello

line, transposed up an octave). Each successive fugal entry brings in a new instrument or group of instruments, and at bar 37 Geminiani adds a new entry (replacing a subordinate line in the original); the result is that there is a sus- tained orchestral build-up throughout the entire passage. Even the minor changes that Geminani makes can be understood in structural terms. He changes the disguised version of the fugal subject at bar 31 back to the form that it first took; this stiffens the music’s structure, because it makes the structural significance of bar 31 immediately obvious in a way that it was not in Corelli’s version. Similarly Geminiani’s recasting of the upper parts at bars 38-9, using a repeated triadic motive, has a more-than-local significance; the same motive appears at bars 17-l 8 of Geminiani’s version, and whereas it is nowhere to be found in the original version of this movement, it figures prominently in the preceding Adagio (see Ex. 1, bars 3 and 7). Again, then, Geminiani is tightening up the music, transforming what were originally allusions or implied refer- ences into literal repetitions and overt relationships. Or to revert to the terminology I used in the previous section, he is giving explicit realisation to what were only implications in Corelli’s original, and the result is a distinct shift in aesthetic character.

As a result of the change in medium, Geminiani’s arrangement has a greater surface complexity than what Corelli originally wrote; writing a generation later, Burney charged him with ‘multiplying notes, and loading, and deform- ing, I think, those melodies, that were more graceful and pleasing in their light original dress’, and concluded sourly that he had ‘atchieved [sic] what a plod-



32

I’ x 6 5 11 (7) 6 6 5’4 6

(6) ‘: 6 ; 6 ‘: 6 ‘: 6

ding contrapuntist of inferior abilities might have done as we11’.28 Certainly the musical interpretation that is embodied in Geminiani’s version is more straightforward and more literal-minded than Corelli’s. (That, of course, may be as much a function of genre as of personal disposition.) And the recorder version displays something of the same literal-minded quality. Like Geminiani, Walsh’s master transforms the entry at bar 31 back into its original form. Again, as

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Ex. 8 shows, the recorder’s characteristic melodic pattern at bar 333 brings out a repetition of bars 16-l 7 which, though visible in Corelli’s original score, is by no means strongly projected. (The way in which Walsh’s master creates and maintains characteristic motivic figures like this perhaps reflects the continu- ing influence of the English tradition of playing divisions, as set out most nota- bly in Christopher Simpson’s The Divison-vi~Z.~~) And in bars 35-9 (Ex. 9) the recorder version has a series of sequences which presents in a literal and overt form the underlying pattern of rising and falling fourths that is disguised by the double stops in Corelli’s version; there is a suggestion of banality about the way the musical structure is spelled out here which could easily have been avoided (along the lines of Ex. 10, say). Maybe Burney would have looked upon Walsh’s ‘eminent Master’ as another plodding contrapuntist.

There exists, however, a further version of this movement in which the urge

Ex. 8 Recorder arrangement of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement: comparison of bars 14-18,31-4

- 6 4 6: 6: 67 7 7 7 7 7 7 2

Ex. 9 Recorder arrangement of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement, bars 35-9, with analysis

Corelli

646: 2 6 6 66 5 3 7 4 2 6 11’ 5

6 S6 56 56 6 4 : 6 6 5 2



Ex. 10 Alternative arrangement of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement, bars 37-9

to regularise Corelli’s music, to spell out its coherence, takes a much more drastic form. It is contained in a manuscript entitled ‘Dissertazioni de1 Fran- cesco Veracini sopra 1’Opera Quinta de1 Corelli’ (in the former Liceo Musicale library in Bologna),30 and though written for the original instruments it represents a wholescale recomposition of Corelli’s music. Veracini’s version of the Op. 5 sonatas is nowadays fairly well known, as a result of its publication in a modern performing edition, 31 but there is a lack of contextual information about it and as a result neither its date nor the purpose for which it was intended is really clear. 32 The issue with which I am concerned, however, is the nature of the relationship of the ‘Dissertazioni’ to Corelli’s original music, and this at least is susceptible to analytical enquiry.

Ex. 11 shows the first nineteen bars ofveracini’s version. Comparison with Ex. 5 reveals a number of changes, the intention of which is not always immediately obvious. The easiest to see, of course, is the elimination of the bass in bars l-6. Other changes require closer scrutiny. In bar 3, for instance,Veracini extends Corelli’s semiquaver figure in the violin so that the second entry (on the third beat in the original) arrives half a bar later; it now comes over tonic harmony, and as a resultveracini has to change the entry so that it begins on c2 instead of d2. Veracini’s bar 6, however, takes the place of Corelli’s bars 53-64, and the result is that by the beginning of bar 7 the two versions have come back into alignment. While Veracini does not change the bass entry, however, he totally rewrites the violin part, and then from bar 9 the two versions diverge completely: Veracini inserts a four-bar interpolation based on the preceding material, so that the two versions do not coincide again until halfway through his bar 14 (corresponding to Corelli’s bar 10) .33 After that the two versions run together until the last beat ofveracini’s bar 17 (Corelli’s bar 13), whereveracini patches in three beats of violin figuration from Corelli’s bars 234-242, followed by five beats taken from Corelli’s bars 423-433, under which he adds a fugal entry in the bass - an entry for which there is no direct equivalent in Corelli’s version, for by now the two movements have so completely diverged in terms of form that it is impossible to be sure what should be aligned with what.

This kind of bar-by-bar commentary makes little sense of what Veracini has done; it does not really advance beyond what Mary Gray White calls a ‘statement of obvious fact: that Veracini liked to do one thing where Corelli preferred to do another’.34 In order to go further, we need to approachVeracini’s changes from the opposite direction, that is to say the overall organisation of the movement. In essence, Veracini has reconceived Corelli’s fugal structure,

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Ex. 11 Veracini’s version of Op. 5 No. 3, second movement, bars l-l 9

reconfiguring what Corelli wrote so that it fits the new conception. Corelli’s movement represents a typically loose fugal form, in the sense that the entries are not regularly disposed in terms of duration, tonal level, or assignment to instrument (which in turn means that there is no clear distinction between structural entries and merely textural incorporations of the opening figure). Moreover it is largely made up of episodic passages unrelated to the fugal subject - a practice whichveracini sharply criticised in his treatise of around 1760, where he wrote of the ‘useless tinkling and much falseness that results in composing when . . . one fills Fugues with lost notes, that is with oakum and stuffing for use in pack-saddles’.35 Suiting word to action, Veracini has turned what Corelli wrote into a movement that displays exactly the opposite characteristics.

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His starting point is Corelli’s opening figure, obviously, and the six-bar span between the opening and the bass entry at bar 7. This span has no privileged role in Corelli’s movement. By contrast, it becomes the organising principle of the entire opening section ofveracini’s (and of course the effect of his elimination of the bass in bars l-6 is to give the six-bar span an immediate promi- nence). The entries at bars 1,7, 13 and 19 are not only six bars apart; they are all at the same tonal level, and they alternate between violin and bass. Moreo- ver, each six-bar phrase is made up of two three-bar sub-phrases. At this point it becomes clear whyveracini added two beats in bar 3, and subtracted two in bars 5-6: the net result is to shift Corelli’s second entry from bar 33 to the beginning of bar 4, so that it bisects the six-bar phrase. Veracini can now modify the resulting three-bar phrases so that they clearly correspond to one another, and this is achieved by his new semiquaver passage at bar 6, which forms a near sequence with his extended bar 3. As a result, there is something approaching a sequential relationship between bars l-3 and 4-6 as a whole. But this presents a new danger: Veracini wants to create main phrases of six bars divided by three-bar sub-phrases, whereas an entirely sequential relationship between the three-bar sub-phrases would tend to turn them into phrases in their own right.The solution is to de-emphasise the entry at bar 4, so clari- fying its subordinate status. And this is precisely what Veracini achieves by changing its first note from c2 to d2, as I have already mentioned.

Everything now falls into place. The passage which Veracini interpolates from bar 9 creates a new three-bar sub-phrase (bars 10-12, forming a near sequence with 7-9), as well as a new fugal entry at bar 13; moreover his new counter-figure in the violin at bar 7 reappears not only at bar 10 but also at bar 13, now in the bass. (It was specifically invertible counterpoint that Veracini proposed as the means of doing away with ‘oakum and stuffing’.) And in the following bars, whereveracini at last moves away from the 3+3 pattern, he goes out of his way to create a high degree of motivic unity, elaborating the fourths in Corelli’s bass line into explicit imitations of the violin figure and so tying the two lines into a single, seamless fabric (compare bar 15 of Veracini’s version with bar 11 of Corelli’s). It would be easy, but redundant, to go through the whole movement in the same way, showing how unrelated episodic material has been excised, entries have been clearly grouped together, and an overall tensional morphology articulated, the result of which is (as John Walter Hill puts it, referring to the ‘Dissertazioni’ in general) to create ‘greater logic and consistency even to the point of becoming pedantic or academic’.36 Certainly Veracini is one of those composers whose music responds most gratefully to the analyst’s endeavours.

Understood this way,Veracini’s reworkings of Corelli’s Op. 5 - reworkings so fundamental that in Walter Kolneder’s view ‘they could be described as new compositions’37 - represent exactly the opposite of the process which we s 6 w at


200 NICHOLAS COOK

work in Corelli’s graces for the opening movement of this sonata. In the latter, aspects of underlying structure were clarified or projected by a new surface that rendered explicit what was merely implicit in the original. Veracini’s version of the second movement, by contrast, embodies a radically different formal conception from Corelli’s; the music that Corelli wrote is broken up into fragments and reshuffled into a quite new pattern, almost in the manner of cutting and pasting on a word processor. What was Veracini’s purpose in doing this? The obvious answer is that, in Hill’s words, he was making ‘a non-verbal commentary on Corelli’s sonatas’;38 that, as Hill points out, is what the title ‘Dissertazioni’ seems to imply. Hill also emphasises the extent to which the ‘Dissertazioni’ illustrate the arguments that Veracini advanced in his treatise against the sophistry and superficiality of the gulant style; ‘Against what he saw as the shallowness, ineptness, and unoriginality of much mid-eighteenth-century music’, writes Hill, Veracini ‘advocated a reform partly based on models of the distant past, on Palestrina, for the most part’.39 Seen this way,Veracini’s reworking of Corelli’s Op. 5 - music that itself was by then more than half a century old - would represent not only a turn away from the music of his own day, but also an act of constructive criticism. The ‘Dissertazioni’ show the extent to which even Corelli’s music is made up of ‘oakum and stuffing’, and demonstrate in the most practical manner how this can be eliminated by the application of the principles of strict counterpoint. And if, as appears possible, the ‘Dissertazioni’ were not performed in Veracini’s lifetime, or even perhaps intended for performance, that would be consistent with a work which is better understood as a kind of aesthetic tract than as a composition in any normal sense.40

Persuasive though this interpretation may be, there are some complicating factors. One revolves around the date of the ‘Dissertazioni’ and consequently the extent to which they can be linked with the treatise; since the argument is both complicated and inconclusive I am relegating it to a footnote.41 More directly relevant is the fact that Veracini is not as consistent in the application of his aesthetic principles as Hill’s alignment of the ‘Dissertazioni’ with the treatise might suggest. Certainly the kind of regularising and tightening of structure that I have described in the second movement of Op. 5 No. 3 is typical ofVeracini’s procedures. But there are occasions on which he does just the opposite. Whereas we have seen Veracini reorganising Corelli’s music to give it a more symmetrical and clearly articulated phrase structure, in the fourth movement of Op. 5 No. 4 he changes Corelli’s symmetrical phrase structure in such a way as to make it asymmetrical; similarly, in the opening movement of Op. 5 No. 2 he covers up Corelli’s breaks between phrases so as to create a seamless, continuous structure. 42 It really seems as if, to adapt White’s words, Veracini liked to do one thing because Corelli preferred to do another. And this is not, perhaps, as perverse as it sounds. After all, what better way could be



found to bring about Marx’s ‘thrill of the new’ in the performance of older music than presenting some of the best known passages in the eighteenth- century repertory in novel compositional contexts - or, to put it in analytical terms, patching old surfaces onto new structures - and so putting the familiar at the service of the unfamiliar? It is tempting to borrow from Barthes and speak of the pleasure of intertextuality.

III

The versions of Corelli’s Op. 5 discussed above represent something of the diversity of ways in which what is in some sense ‘the same’ music may be elaborated, modified, or recomposed - for the point is, of course, that we think of all these versions of Op. 5 as just that, versions of Op. 5, and not independent compositions in their own right. (While Kolneder describesveracini’s versions as ‘new compositions’, he still publishes them under the title Zwiilf Sonaten nach Arcangelo Core& Opus 5.) But what do we mean when we refer to ‘the same’ music, given that the note-to-note surface is subject to such massive transformations? As I indicated earlier, to put the question this way is to suggest that it is susceptible to a Schenkerian answer: the identity of the music resides in what lies beneath the surface, perhaps at foreground level (I am using this term in the strict sense of denoting a structural level, not as a synonym for the musical surface or score). Understood this way, the foreground would define the essential melodic content of Op. 5, and as such be obligatory; the graced surface, on the other hand, would be optional, a matter of performance interpretation. Or to put it more figuratively, we would see composers as in- habiting the depths, while performers reside at the surface - at the interface, so to speak, between music and the external world.

I began by showing how ornamentation such as is found in Corelli’s own graced version of the first movement from Op. 5 No. 3 can be satisfactorily explained in terms of just such an approach: Corelli’s graces elaborate his 1700 score in essentially the same way that any musical surface elaborates its underlying structure. Seen this way, what Corelli originally published was not so much a score in the normal sense but rather a kind of foreground graph that defined the movement in the sense of embodying its essential features (together with a bass line which may or may not have been intended for literal performance). But this appealingly straightfoward model, with its clear division between the spheres of composition and performance, becomes increasingly problematic as the transformations between foreground and surface become more radical. Even as I used Schenkerian techniques to analyse Geminiani’s version of the opening movement from Op. 5 No. 9, I pointed out that the graces tend to complement rather than duplicate the properties of the original score: rather than the surface projecting the content of the underlying struc-

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ture, complementation implies a contrast, a diversity of function. And the contrast between surface and underlying structure becomes still more marked in Geminiani’s versions of the faster movements from Op. 5 No. 9: the effect of Geminiani’s changes to the finale is to create a character, and in particular a tensional morphology, quite different from that of the original. Here we are faced with a surface that has just the opposite properties to the underlying structure. But even the metaphor of surface and underlying structure becomes questionable in the Gigu, where Geminiani’s version actually contains fewer notes than the original. And all these problems are magnified in Veracini’s ‘Dissertazioni’, where we saw Corelli’s music being chopped up and reassem- bled in the service of a fundamentally different conception of what a fugue should be. It begins to look as if there is something wrong in the whole idea of using Schenkerian methods, and perhaps any approach based on structural hierarchy, as a means of defining musical identity.

It is not hard to construct arguments as to why this should be so. For one thing, the entire project might be described as riddled with anachronism. No- body in the eighteenth century, after all, had heard of Schenkerian analysis; in making use of it, we are imposing a twentieth-century approach which does not merely ride roughshod over the national differences that bulked so large in the eighteenth century’s perception of itself, but assumes that music has an underlying structure which it is the performer’s job to project - an assumption that is certainly not to be found in any eighteenth-century source, at least in anything remotely resembling the way that Schenker expressed it. (Did Corelli- the-perfomer really put in that c3 in bar 18 of Ex. 1 because of the structural descent from 8 to a?) And as if that were not enough, we are then asking this anachronistic approach to accomplish something that is itself just as anachronistic, namely to model a concept of musical identity which simply did not exist at that time. Or at least this is what might be suggested by a casual reading of Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical I%rks,43 which argues that there was a profound change in the conceptualisation of the musical work around 1800. Goehr’s argument, however, is not that there was no concept until then that pieces of music had an identity of their own, such that ‘the same’ piece might appear in different versions (or, for that matter, be given different performances); any such argument would fly in the face of practically all documentary evidence of music before 1800, not to mention common sense. Her point is a much more focused one, namely that the identity of musical works became what she calls a ‘regulative concept’ in musical culture around the beginning of the nineteenth century; one symptom of this is the shift in meaning of the word ‘work’ from its pre-1800 application to publications - as exemplified by Corelli’s Op. 5 -to its present-day sense of an integrated artistic unit.44

At the risk of unnecessarily multiplying terminology, one might say that what


SCHENKER,~ORELLI ANDTHEGRACES 203

is at issue in the analysis of the versions of Op. 5 is not ‘work identity’ at all, in the post-1800 sense, but ‘piece identity’ - something that was clearly impli- cated in both theoretical and informal discourse about music throughout the eighteenth century. Rather than pursuing this distinction, however, I shall anticipate a more subtle objection which might be raised against the whole project of trying to model musical identity in structural terms, and which goes like this. Our categorisation of the different versions of Op. 5 as just that - versions of what is in some sense ‘the same’ music - is not the simple descrip- tion of an empirical reality. In other cultures (or even in other contexts within our own culture) these same phenomenal objects might be described as individuals rather than as tokens of a single class. The fact that we call them versions of Op. 5 is a fact about our cultural practices, and as such historically contingent; it is not a fact about the phenomenal objects in question. And that means that the attempt to derive cultural categories directly from the attributes of those objects represents an illicit theoretical reductionism. Now this argument, which is closely linked with the ‘New’ musicological critique of theory,45 is irrefutable as far as it goes; the musical work is a social construction.46 But the argument does not go far enough to provide any insight into the circumstances under which we do, or do not, group individuals together into classes. The basic problem is that to assume that the relationship between phenomenal object and cultural categorisation is a purely arbitrary one is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the musical work is not just a social construction. Underlying any such categorisation is some kind of material trace - what Nattiez formerly called a neutral level - which may, or may not, afford a given interpretation.47 And the role of music theory is to model this pattern of afford- ante in a manner which (unlike the cultural categorisation) is open to empirical verification or refutation. In short, analysis cannot provide a comprehensive explanation of the cultural processes that lead to ascriptions of piece or work identity, but it should be able to capture those attributes of the music that support such ascriptions.

And yet in some ways the very idea of multiple versions of ‘the same’ piece collides with the assumptions of Schenkerian theory. Particularly at issue here is what I termed the notion of alternativity. Eighteenth-century performing practice is predicated on the multiplicity of viable graces for any given slow movement in Op. 5; the German writers called them ‘arbitrary ornaments’ precisely because they were not rigidly codified but allowed scope for individual imagination. (‘To play an Adagio well’, writes Quantz, ‘you must enter as much as possible into a calm and almost melancholy mood, so that you execute what you have to play in the same state of mind as that in which the composer wrote it’.48) Contemporary manuscripts of Op. 5 exist in which different graced versions of the same movement are aligned one above the other for purposes of comparison;49 people didn’t think that because one way of playing the graces


204 NICHOLAS COOK

was right, others must be wrong. But such pluralism jars with the language of determinism and inevitability that is so characteristic of Schenker. The organic coherence of music, as Schenker explains it, lies in the relationships of strict entailment between levels that form the core of his theory; he begins the second chapter of Free Composition by saying that ‘The content of the second and subsequent levels is determined by the content of the first level’.50 However Schenker goes on to say that the content of the middleground ‘is influenced by goals in the foreground, mysteriously sensed and pursued’.This hint of a reciprocal determination of the various structural levels (to which I shall return towards the end of this article) is, in truth, a very necessary part of the theory, for taken literally the doctrine of strict entailment would lead to an absurd conclusion: that there could be only three legitimate compositions, one for each version of the UrZink5’

But there is a much more practical example of the underlying structure that has a multitude of alternative surface realisations, and that is the variation set. The basic structural principle of the variation set is one of alternation and accumulation; indeed it might be considered the most direct expression of Marx’s ‘thrill of the new’. There is to this extent a significant parallel between the versions of Corelli’s Op. 5 and the fashionable variation sets which early nineteenth-century composers based round familiar themes, drawn mainly from the operas of the day (a genre as intimately associated with the emergence of the virtuoso pianist as was Corelli’s Op. 5 with the virtuoso violinist). And an important observation, revolving around the concept of the theme, can be drawn from this parallel. ‘If we accept the basic notion that the theme, by definition, is the structural model for each of the ensuing variations’, write Allen Forte and Steven Gilbert in their textbook on Schenkerian analysis, ‘we can see that the variation process is essentially the reverse of the reductive process with which most of this book has been concerned’.52 Forte and Gilbert, then, are making the same kind of connection between Schenkerian analysis and variation as I am proposing between Schenkerian analysis and free ornamentation. But the crucial element of their statement is the proviso, which refers to the theme of a variation set as its ‘structural model’.

This ostensibly redundant concept is necessary in order to make a distinction between what we conventionally call the ‘theme’ of a variation set - the initial presentation, usually in a familar and/or relatively simple form, of the music which the variations will vary - and what, in analytical terms, the term really ought to mean: the abstract linear and/or melodic (and/or rhythmic, textural, and so on) prototype on which the variations are based. The point is that, with few if any exceptions, variation sets do not vary their so-called themes in a literal sense. What they vary are reductions of themes.53 (To take an illustration so simple that it does not require a music example, the c#2-d2-c#2 neighbour- note motion in the first bar of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K. 331 does not feature



in most of the variations; what is varied is the consonant skip from c#~ to e2. Forte and Gilbert’s analysis of the third movement from Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 109, in which the variation extends well into the middleground, provides a much more complex example.) Writing variations on a theme, then, is not simply the reverse of analytical reduction, as Forte and Gilbert suggest; it actually incorporates analytical reduction, too. And precisely the same applies to arrangements. When Walsh’s ‘eminent Master’ arranged Op. 5 No. 3 for recorder, he did not simply transcribe Corelli’s violin figuration, adjusting the tessitura as required and somehow getting round the problem of double stops; instead he stripped off Corelli’s violinistic surface, and replaced it with a new one conceived in terms of the recorder - which, as I said, gives the music a decorative quality that is foreign to the original. (When Beethoven transcribed his Piano Sonata Op. 14 No. 1 for string quartet, as I have explained elsewhere, he en- gaged in a much more drastic recompositional exercise, at times taking the original right back to its roots in linear counterpoint and figured bass.54) An arrangement, in other words, represents the wresting of an abstract idea away from one instrumental or vocal medium and its sometimes forcible incorpora- tion within another; like variation, it involves reduction and therefore necessarily embodies some kind of analytical interpretation of the original.

And this approach also applies to the graced versions of Op. 5. Some of them, as I have already noted, include virtually every note of the original.55 But others do not; one might express this by saying that, in them, what we normally think of as ornamentation tends towards variation. An example is Geminiani’s elaborated version of the first movement of Op. 5 No. 9; comparison of the two upper staves in Ex. 2 will show that he omits Corelli’s d2 at bar 12, the b1-ctt2 at bar 2l, the gtt2, e2 and c#~ at bars 34-41, and similarly throughout the remainder of the movement. Why these notes? Quantz implies the answer when he says that ‘In general you must always see to it in the variations that the principal notes, on which the variations are made, are not obscured’;56 his identification of the principal notes as the ones on which ornamentation is to be based translates readily into Schenkerian terms. (This, of course, contains the beginnings of a response to the charge of analytical anachronism.) And it is indeed the non-structural notes that Geminiani ignores: the d2 at bar l2 is a neighbour note which Geminani replaces by means of a consonant skip, the b’--~#~ at bar 2l is an escape-note motion linking a1 and b’ which Geminiani replaces by a descent to another chord note (d#‘), and so forth. Just as in writing variations or making an arrangement, then, Geminiani effectively analyses Corelli’s music in such a way as to eliminate non-structural notes, and uses the resulting reduction as the basis of his elaboration. But this means that our previous identification of Corelli’s 1700 score and the Schenkerian foreground was not quite correct. For the score includes elements of elaboration that are not shared with other versions; it is, in other words, not the pure representation of content at a


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given structural level but a musical surface in its own right, of however minimalist a nature. (This is something to which I shall return at the end of this article.) And this solves the problem we found with Geminani’s version of the Gigu from Op. 5 No. 9, which contained fewer notes than Corelli’s original. What we are dealing with is not a surface and a foreground, but two surfaces; Geminiani in effect reduces Corelli’s surface to a foreground, and then creates a new surface of his own. Seen this way, there is nothing un-Schenkerian about the process after all; it is just that there is not such a clear separation between the spheres of composer and performer as in the original formulation.

But now we have exchanged one problem for another. We are still saying that, as in variations and arrangements, the multitudinous versions of Op. 5 are versions of Op. 5, and not independent compositions, because they embody the same underlying structure, the same structural counterpoint with the bass, as Corelli’s original; that is where the identity of Op. 5 resides.57 (Maybe this does not apply to Veracini’s ‘Dissertazioni’, but then we know that they hover on the brink of being independent compositions.) The basic principle is ac- cordingly one of invariance, and it equally informs Forte and Gilbert’s statement that in the analysis of variation sets ‘A correct background reading of the theme will be reinforced by the variations, while an incorrect reading will be refuted.‘58 In either case, then, the analytical process is one of distinguishing what is invariant from what changes, and understanding the latter in terms of the former. But the new problem to which I referred emerges when we align the different versions of Op. 5 with one another in order to identify the invariant elements. Ex. 12 presents the problem in miniature: it shows bars 17-20 of the original version of the Sarubandu from Op. 5 No. 8 (bottom two staves), together with three elaborated versions taken from a manuscript in the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester.59

All three elaborations retain Corelli’s sequential pattern as well, of course, as the harmonic structure implied by the bass line (although there are some inter- esting false relations with the bass, such as the gh2 and q2 in bar 173 of the top version). But in each of them Corelli’s relaxed, arch-shaped contour is sub- merged beneath a jagged profile that reaches up to b2 in bar 17 (a2 in bar 19) before falling back to the lower register. Ex. 13 shows what is at issue. Bar 18 of the first Manchester version introduces the b2 as a simple reflection of the b’, without incorporating it into a linear motion. In this way the underlying structure is exactly the same as in Corelli’s original, yielding parallel tenths at each downbeat (Ex. 13b). The second version, by contrast, incorporates the b2 within a continuous downward motion that encompasses the E major and the A minor triads (note the mordents that emphasise each successive fall of a third); there is still a c2 on the downbeat of bar 18, but it is now an intermediate point on the way to the a1 that arrives on the second beat, the strong beat of the sarabande. (Another way of putting this is that the e2 is no longer a simple consonant skip

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Ex. 12 Op. 5 No. 8, third movement, bars 17-20

Corelli

6 :

6 :

from the b’, but is linked across the bar to c2 and a’.) And on the repeat, in bars 19-20, the continuity of motion by thirds is reinforced by the substitution, against the sequence pattern, of d2 for the expected a’. The third version takes the implications of the second version a stage further. Neither the b1 nor the a1 is there; they have been replaced by b2 and a2, initiating triadic falls to a’ and g’ respectively. And in this way the original tenths between melody and line and bass have entirely disappeared. Even if we admit b1 and a1 as implied notes at bars 17 and 19, we still end up with a pattern of 10-8, 10-8 (Ex. 13c), as against the consistent tenths of Corelli’s original.

The problem, of course, is that instead of a single underlying structure we have two different structures directed towards different notes (b’ in Corelli’s and the first Manchester versions, and g1 in the others). If the identity of Op. 5 lies in its underlying structures, then, the second and third Manchester versions are not versions of Op. 5 at all, but something else. But that is as silly a conclusion as Goodman’s suggestion that if you change (or fluff) a single note you are no longer playing the same piece. (It would be equally silly to claim that the variations in the third movement of Op. 109 are not variations since they involve different middlegrounds.) There is of course a way out of all this: we simply need to retreat to a more remote middleground level that is common to all of these versions - the highest common factor, so to speak - and instead locate the identity of the piece there. (At this more remote level, bars 17-20 constitute the final part of a prolongation of 5, b’, leading to 4 in bar 2 1 and so by step to the final i; the different versions of bars 17-20 are both compatible with this structure but approach the 4 in different ways.) But this flexibility is purchased at a cost. Used this way, Schenkerian analysis becomes like bubble


208 NICHOLAS COOK

Ex. 13 Reductions of Op. 5 No. 8, third movement, bars 17-20

(a)

(b)

(c)

gum: the further you stretch it, the thinner it gets. In reducing the melodic identity of this passage to a mere prolongation of !? we are getting dangerously close to the familiar jibe that Schenker reduced all music to three notes. And the problem is exacerbated by what one might describe as the ‘shareware’ quality of much of Corelli’s music, reflected - however unfairly - in Burney’s remark that ‘There seems some justice in Geminani’s opinion, that Corelli’s continual recourse to certain favourite passages betrays a want of resource.They were so many bar rests for his invention.‘60 (Here, perhaps, is a particular moti- vation for Geminani’s version of Op. 5 No. 9.) Wherever we look, work identity seems to be evaporating before our very eyes.

It might be objected, and with some reason, that all of this represents an inappropriately literal, or legalistic, application of Schenkerian principles. Af- ter all, even orthodox Schenkerians like Carl Schachter have entertained the admissability of alternative middlegrounds (a proposition which Schenker



himself was not able to accept). 61 And more generally it might be claimed that most analysts today see the Schenkerian approach as a fruitful metaphor for the understanding of the common-practice repertory, a heuristic platform, rather than a model to be applied in the mechanistic manner of Ex. 13. (After all, can’t we see that in some musical sense - a sense evidently shared by eighteenth-century musicians - all of these variants represent the same essential conception? And don’t we have enough means of transformation in fully- fledged Schenkerian theory, with its temporal displacements and implied notes, to bring virtually any formation back into the fold if only we want to badly enough?) But of course this is as much as to say that Schenkerian analysis must remain on a fundamentally esthesic plane, to borrow a term from Nattiez. And in that case it is incapable of telling us anything about the neutral level, the material trace that affords cultural (including esthesic) ascriptions of work identity: it is the old problem of Pythagoras’s lever. Once again, in short, we seem to be on the verge of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For if we can locate the identity of Op. 5 neither in the surface nor in the structure that underlies it, what grounds do we have for saying that it has any identity at all? We set out to use Schenkerian analysis to explain Op. 5, but we seem to have ended up by explaining it away.

IV

The search for a structural model of musical identity that gives every indica- tion of being a chimera is more than a little reminiscent of the search for ‘original’ versions and definitive texts that long characterised musicological source criticism - a search which Stanley Boorman, in a recent review of textual schol- arship, has described as ‘hardly a worthwhile exercise’.62 Boorman’s argument, which represents what may by now be called a critical orthodoxy, is that the search for authoritative sources that fully represent composers’ intentions is a search for something which does not exist because it cannot exist - because, in a word, it is an illusion. But he gives this familiar argument a distinctive twist. We may assume, he says, that composers know what they want. But the irreme- diable incompleteness of notation means that there is no way in which they can specify all the details of what they want. Equally, they cannot help specifying things that they do not in any positive sense want. In Boorman’s words, the composers of the past ‘would have recognised that certain elements of any composition were less significant than others. They had to write them down, of course, for a text is not viable in a fragmentary state. But that did not give these elements a canonical status.‘63 Any composer’s text, then, is an amalgam of things that are considered essential and things that are considered contingent. And there is no way in which anybody else can tell the two apart, except through the process of educated guesswork known as interpretation. When


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scribes, copyists, or even printers transmit a composition, then, they incorpo- rate those elements that they consider essential along with those which they consider contingent, and so the text evolves in the light of successive acts of interpretation. The same applies to performances, which likewise involve de- ciding what is essential and what can (or must) be changed, and which again result in the transmission of things the performer considers essential but which cannot be disentangled from those he or she considers contingent. And the result of all this is that, as Boorman puts it, ‘The text, as it appears in sources, is not . . . a simple definer of the work: it is a version of the work, carrying elements believed to be essential to that composition, and other elements used to link these together.‘64

Boorman’s conclusion that all texts, and even performances, are versions of the work - and in this sense on a par with one another - is of course incompat- ible with the old-fashioned language of musicology according to which the Urtext defined the work, other sources corrupted it, and performances realised (or failed to realise) it. But it corresponds very closely to the moral Barbara Herrnstein Smith drew from her overview of the myriad versions of ‘Cinder- ella’. As Smith puts it, ‘In most of them, we find an initially ill-treated or otherwise unfortunate heroine, though sometimes her name is not Cinderella but Cencienta or Aschenputtel, Echenfettle, Fette-mette or Tan Chan; and sometimes she isn’t the youngest stepchild but the oldest daughter; and sometimes she is not a heroine but a hero; and usually the fairy godmother is a cat, or a cow, or a tree; and the glass slipper is a gold ring.‘65 The problem is obvious: once you move away from identifying ‘Cinderella’ with a particular version of the story - Perrault’s, say - it becomes impossible to say just where the ‘Cinder- ella’ story turns into some other story, and so you end up with the unwelcome conclusion that ‘Cinderella’ is all stories, and all stories are ‘Cinderella’.66 Ac- cordingly, Smith concludes: ‘For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it’67 - and all of these, of course, are themselves versions of the story. In view of this it is not surprising that, as Smith puts it, the question as to ‘the origin of “the story of Cinderella” has not yet been determined’ - and what is more, she adds, ‘it cannot be determined: not because the evidence is so meager - or so overwhelming - but rather because it becomes increasingly clear that to ask the question in that form is already to beg it’.‘j8

We are coming onto familiar ground. Jose Bowen has invoked the ‘Cinder- ella’ story as a model for understanding the variants of jazz standards such as ‘Round Midnight.69 But the most striking parallel in the musicological litera- ture is with Charles Seeger’s study of the variants of ‘Barbara Allen’, in which he made a valiant attempt to theorise the distinction between the song and its various performed versions, but was forced to conclude that


SCHENKER,~ORELLI ANDTHE GRACES 211

no such entity as ‘the “Barbara Allen” tune’ can be set up other than for temporary convenience. The fact that with a few intermediate steps we can easily change one version into the other must be regarded in the light of the fact that we can change either version into any other tune of like length with a little, less, or more ease. Melodies are, by their very nature, infinitely change- able or interchangeable.70

Instead of positing some invariant structure or sequence of elements which might identify or define ‘the “Barbara Allen” tune’, then, the best that can be done is to recognise the irreducible multiplicity of ‘Barbara Allen’ and to adopt a descriptive stance towards it; in Seeger’s words, his analysis reflects ‘majority usage’ - a usage, of course, that varies across the years. And what he shows is that, while the variants may have no single feature in common, each variant has features in common with at least one other variant. The result is what Witt- genstein called a ‘family resemblances’ structure: a kind of network structure where everything is linked, whether directly or indirectly, to everything else.71

How might all this relate to Corelli’s Op. 5? The answer, I hope, is obvious. Each version of any given movement has some relationship to Corelli’s original score, and is likely to resemble other versions of it more or less closely. (Even Veracini’s ‘Dissertazioni’ can be brought back into the fold on this model.) There is no ‘single basically basic’ version of Op. 5; even Corelli’s original version is just that, a version of Op. 5, like Cinderella or, as Boorman tells us, like any musical score. Each version (Corelli’s included) mixes up things that who- ever created it considered essential with things that he or she considered contingent, and each arranger or performer has made different assumptions about what is essential and what is contingent in Corelli’s.

Consider, for example, the four versions of the Sarabanda in Ex. 12 above. Although there is very little that all the versions have in common (little more, in fact, than the rhythmic framework, the underlying harmony determined by the bass line, and the function of an approach to d),, each is closely related to at least one other. Table 1 shows a few of the features that might be considered relevant in this connection, and their distribution among the four versions. (A is Corelli’s version, with the three Manchester versions being respectively B, C and D.) First, there are the two underlying structures I described earlier: ‘10’ refers to the parallel tenths pattern (b’-c2, al-b’) found in the Corelli and first Manchester versions, ‘8’ to the octaves pattern found in the second and third Manchester versions. Second, there is a distinction between what might be termed open and closed registration, the former being characterised by the addition of the higher octave (b2, a2) in bars 17 and 19 of all three Manchester versions. And finally, there is the distinction between the upbeat phrasing found in the third Manchester version (bar 18, beat 3) and the downbeat phrasing of all the other versions. Table 2 includes the same information, but presented this time on the basis of whether a specific pair of versions is the same or

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212 NICHOLAS COOK

Table 1 Features in four version of Op. 5 No. 8, third movement

A B C D

underlying structure 10 10 8 8

registration (open/closed) c 0 0 0

phrasing (upbeat/downbeat) D D D U

Table 2 Sharing of features in four versions of Op. 5 No. 8, third movement

AB AC AD BC BD CD value

underlying structure 1 0 0 0 0 1 2

registration (open/closed) 0 0 0 1 1 1 1

phrasing (upbeat/downbeat) 1 1 0 1 0 0 1

subtotals 2 1 0 2 1 2

weighted 3 1 0 2 1 3

different in respect to the feature in question; ‘1’ means that each version is the same, ‘0’ that they are different. (So, in the row for underlying structure, there is a ‘1’ under AB because A and B share the pattern with tenths, and under CD because C and D share the pattern with octaves. No other pair shares the same underlying structure, which is why there are ‘O’s under AC, AD, BC and BD.) It can be seen at a glance that every version has a feature in common with every other version except A and D - though even they share the remote middleground and underlying harmony, of course.

The weakness of family resemblances as an explanatory model is its very inclusiveness: you can almost always find SOme connection between any two musical configurations, whether you would normally think of them as versions of ‘the same’ music or not. For this reason it is useful to develop the family resemblances model in such a way that one is not just showing whether there is a connection (there always is) but how strong the connection is. One obvious way in which this can be done is by counting features: as shown in the penulti- mate line of Table 2, A and B share two features, A and C share only one, and therefore A is more closely related to B than to C. (Seen this way, the closest relationships are AB, BC and CD, strongly suggesting that the three Manches- ter versions were composed in the order they are written down, with B being modelled on the Corelli original, C on B, and D on C; that would also fit with the weakest relationship being between A and D.) There is a problem with this


SCHENKER~CORELLIAND THE GRACES 213

approach, of course, in that other features could always be found that would change the equation. But a more important problem is whether or not all features should be regarded as of equal weight. And here it is appropriate to invoke contingency and ask what features musicians of the common-practice tradition considered to be more, or less, essential in the definition of musical identity.

This is a matter of historical practice, not of principle. After all, what would in Schenkerian terms be seen as purely surface features can be regarded as (in this sense) more essential than underlying ones:Veracini’s version of the second movement of Op. 5 No. 5 abundantly illustrates this, since what it shares with Corelli’s original - what might be termed the intersection set of the two - is really only the fugal subject plus some characteristic figuration patterns. Veracini has simply discarded Corelli’s underlying linear-harmonic structure; he has regarded it as contingent, along with the rest of Corelli’s ‘oakum and stuffing’. There is, then, no a priori reason why we should map Boorman’s distinction of essential and contingent onto the Schenkerian distinction of underlying structure and surface. And yet the analyses in the first half of this article have shown that, with the notable exception ofveracini, arrangers and performers of Corelli’s Op. 5 have tended to regard underlying structures as largely essential and surfaces as largely contingent. It is the extent to which the underlying structure represents the intersection set between any two versions of the music that determines the practical usefulness of the Schenkerian method as a means of understanding their relationship. It is not that different versions of ‘the same’ music have to be based on the same underlying structure; it is just that they typically are, and in such cases one might reasonably define the strength of the relationship between them in terms of embedding depth. (A and C inTable 2 are less closely related than A and B because the former share only a remote middleground.) And in this way the discourse hierarchy that is embodied in a Schenkerian approach to ornamentation (or, for that matter, to variations) becomes a matter of historical contingency, subject at any time to revocation. Here as elsewhere, 72 Schenkerian analysis becomes at root a de- scription of historical practice. It is perhaps puzzling that we were ever tempted to see it as anything else.

But the principle of differential weighting can be taken further than this. The very fact that, within the common-practice period, underlying structures have typically been regarded as essential and surfaces as contingent means that the former have acquired greater weight than the latter us an index of typicality. In other words, where an underlying structure is shared this creates a stronger impression of relationship than do such features as open/closed registration or upbeat/downbeat phrasing. This is where the final column ofTable 2 comes in. It reflects the particular salience of underlying relationships in the simplest possible way, by giving them twice the weighting of surface ones; these weight-


214 NICHOLAS COOK

Fig. 1 Schematic representation of four versions of Op. 5 No. 8, third movement

A

C 7

B

D

ings are incorporated into the bottom line ofTable 2. An alternative representation is shown in Fig. 1, where the thickness of the lines corresponds to the values in the bottom line ofTable 2; the path of succession from AB to BC and CD can now be seen at a glance, as can the lack of any relationship (except at the remote middleground level) between A and D.73 And this represents the most concise expression of what, for convenience, I term the musical ‘multitext’: the network of relationships at the level of the material trace which affords cultural ascriptions of work identity.

Fig. 1, based as it is on just four bars from four versions of one movement out of Op. 5 and barely scratching the surface of significant analytical interpretation, represents a tiny cross-section of the vast, dense network of intertextual relationships that makes up Corelli’s Op. 5 as we know it; the interpretative play which is afforded by the impossibility of definitively determining what is essential and what is contingent - and hence of distinguishing between what Harold Bloom calls reading and misreading - constitutes an essential dimension of its signification. Kurt von Fischer has written that ‘Interpretation . . . is a task that never ends because music is not only a historical fact but a process of asking us new questions again and again.‘74 He was speaking of source criticism. But he might just as well have been speaking about the kind of interpretative recreation that is exemplified by the versions of Corelli’s Op. 5, or even about performance in general.

V

I have already mentioned Lydia Goehr’s account of the change of status that took place around 1800 in the concept of the musical work. The idea that a piece of music might be thought of as a kind of virtual object - an idea that is already implicit in talking about it as a ‘piece’ - was not in itself a new one; like other writers, Goehr traces it back at least as far as the sixteenth century.75 What changed around 1800 was the role that this idea played in the culture of Western art music. In a nutshell, music was reconceptualised after the model of the fine arts; the focus of thinking about music was no longer the activity of



music-making and the purposes this activity served, but instead the virtual objects to which it gave rise. And these virtual objects, of course, were musical works, now seen as immutable and detached from the circumstances of their origin (hence the idea of the ‘imaginary museum’).

It is hardly necessary to document the extent to which the twin ideas of immutability and transcendance motivated both aesthetics and musical analysis during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; a representative (though characteristically trenchant) example is Schenker’s statement, in the preface of his monograph on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, of his intention ‘to specify the tonal necessities, hidden until now, that caused it to assume exactly one form and not any other’.76 And the hierarchies through which theorists like Schen- ker sought to express such tonal necessities replicate the hierarchies of textual authority, with the Urtext at the apex and all other versions occupying a more or less subordinate position. Under this regime, the plurality of versions in which music like Corelli’s Op. 5 exists - versions which are epistemologically, so to speak, on a par with one another - became simply unthinkable. Equally unthinkable was the idea, implicit in any family resemblances structure, that the set of legitimate versions of a work might be infinite, because there can uZways be one more version. (Even the idea of arrangement became suspect in the earlier part of the twentieth century, on the grounds that to any musical idea there must correspond one, and only one, fully adequate intrumental or vocal realisation.) Instead, the immutable and inevitably-as-it-is musical work - the masterwork, to use Schenker’s term - was identified with the one and only authoritative text, and musicological discourse became organised around the two principal tasks that this implies: firstly, to establish the one and only authoritative text itself, and secondly, to determine what the composer really intended when he or (less probably) she wrote it. The first task constitutes the discipline of source criticism, the second that of performance practice.

When I referred to the versions of Op. 5 as being epistemologically on a par with one another, I did not mean to deny that Corelli’s 1700 score - and perhaps, to the extent that musicians have believed in its authenticity, the 1710 one too - plays a privileged role within the textual field of Op. 5. Here again the notion of typicality is helpful. Lawrence Zbikowksi has suggested the relevance in this context of recent approaches to categorisation according to which a typical bird, say, might be one that is small and brown, that chirps, and that flies.77 (For this reason a wren is a typical bird whereas a hen is atypical, and an ostrich downright anomalous.) Just as a bird does not have to be small and brown or chirp and fly, so versions of Op. 5 don’t have to share underlying structures with Corelli’s original. But they typically do, partly because the sharing of underlying structure is a typical (though by no means invariable) criterion of work-identity, and partly because eighteenth-century performers typically (but not necessarily) developed their versions of Op. 5 on the basis of Corelli’s origi-


216 NICHOLAS COOK

nal score, rather than some other version. We might express this by saying that Corelli’s original score exemplified Op. 5, rather than defining it in the sense of setting strict compliance classes that must be observed whenever it is performed. The latter, however, is an accurate statement of intent when applied to the majority of scores composed under the regulatory concept of the musical work. And when the musical work is seen as a compliance class, or type, or token, or abstract sound-pattern - when in other words it is seen in terms of any of the existing analytic theories of the musical work7* - it becomes categorically different from any of its instances, exemplars or realisations. It becomes, in short, exactly what Op. 5 is not: an invariant that is shared by all its performances, and in the absence of which we would not be justified in speaking of a ‘performance’ of it at all.

The central proposition of Goehr’s book is that the concept of the musical work is irreducibly historical and that existing philosophical approaches to it have failed because they have looked for a definition of the musical work that is applicable to all times and places; whereas the musical work, as philosophers have sought to define it, only came into existence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and within the specific context of Western ‘art’ music. (Many commentators have demonstrated the inapplicability of the work concept to other traditions: to jazz, to the ‘remix culture’ of contemporary popular music, or to folk music, for example, not to mention non-Western traditions.) The central proposition of this article, by contrast, is that the kind of network structure which I have illustrated in terms of Corelli’s Op. 5 -what I have called the musical ‘multitext’ - did not disappear as the regulatory concept of the musical work took sway within the Western ‘art’ tradition. Or if it disappeared, in the sense that it was no longer visible, that was because it had seeped into the interstices of notation, where it has maintained a highly audible presence ever since. In short, the multitext provides a model for music in performance. Re- acting against the textuality - or, more precisely, monotextuality - that was until the 1980s so dominant a feature of musicology, Lawrence Rosenwald characterised the identity of a piece of music as ‘something existing in the relation between its notation and the field of its performances’.79This formulation, which restores to the musical work the essential dimension of its reception, neatly combines the two key attributes of the multitext in performance: on the one hand the relational field or network that I have illustrated in terms of Corelli’s Op. 5, and on the other the privileged role of a written text that, under the regime of the musical work, is understood not only as a unilateral criterion of the correctness of any performance but also as the ultimate source of its authenticity. In this context, however, privileged does not mean categorically distinct. Both notated texts and acoustic texts - both scores and performances - combine the essential and contingent, and hence are subject to the kind of interpretative activity Boorman describes; as he expresses it, ‘Each perform-



ante . . . is a “text”, conveying as much information to the next performer as would a written version, and influencing the direction in which that new performer will go.‘*O There is, to misquote Lawrence Kramer,*’ no locked gate of difference between the seen and the heard, and it is one of the characteristic features of the musical multitext that it incorporates both.

My aim in analysing the notated variant8 of Op. 5, then, has been to extrapo- late from these visible traces a framework for the analysis of the invisible, but abundantly audible, variance of music in performance; in other words, to ex- trapolate from the notational variance of eighteenth-century Italian violin music a framework for analysing the subnotational variance of which performance consists under the regime of the musical work. But in a way, of course, I have been talking about performance all along. (What, after all, are the graced and otherwise altered notations of Corelli, Geminiani, Dubourg and the rest - with the exception, perhaps, of Veracini - if not traces of, or maybe prescriptions for, performance?82) And I would like to suggest, again by using the visible variance of Op. 5 as a metaphor for the invisible variance of present-day performance, that the analytical approach I have been employing in this article might be adapted in such a way as to capture some of the characteristic features of performance that existing analytical models have neglected or even suppressed. I shall not repeat in detail the frequent criticisms that have been raised against the dominant approach typified by Walter Berry’s Musical Struc- ture and Performance. *83 that it is prescriptive, that it proceeds from analysis to performance, that it tells performers what they have to do rather than listening to what they have to play. 84 The source of all these problems, I would argue, is an uncritical acceptance of the paradigm of monotextuality, and this dovetails with a number of recent (and not so recent) complaints about the practice of analysis in general: that it prioritises sameness over difference, form over feeling, composer over listener. Among those who have expressed these complaints most vociferously is Kevin Korsyn, who sees the root of the problem in what (borrowing from Bakhtin) he calls the monologic nature of analysis; we are deaf, he is in effect saying, to the multiple voices that speak to us in music. And Korsyn concludes: ‘We need new paradigms for analysis, new models that will allow both unity and heterogeneity.‘85

No doubt we do. At the same time, the seeds of dialogic are already to be found in the writings of Schenker, provided that we are prepared to invert our familiar strategy for reading him - to see him in the looking-glass, so to speak. One example I have already quoted: the passage in Free Composition where he speaks of a reciprocal determination of foreground and middleground. This links with his mention, elsewhere in Free Composition, of the composer and the listener ‘meeting’ in the middleground; 87 the implication is that they have come from opposite directions - the composer working from the top (that is, from the synoptic vision of the entire work which Schenker saw as the touchstone of


218 NICHOLAS COOK

genius) down to its individual details, and the listener from the bottom up. Of course performers also work from the bottom up. But then, they work from the top down, too (for instance when they seek to accommodate a local detail to a larger structural motion). All this suggests that we should think of the relationship between analysis and performance not in terms of the projection or realisation of already defined content, but in terms of reciprocation and nego- tiation. And some at least of the tools for such a representation are already there in Schenkerian analysis, as also no doubt in other generative or reductive methods; it is a matter of employing them, so to speak, in reverse operation and so bringing out the music’s heterogeneity rather than its unity. A simple example of what I mean is furnished by Ex. 14, which shows excerpts from the fourth movement (Adagio) from Op. 5 No. 1, in the 1700 and 17 10 versions. The graces in the 17 10 version exploit registral extremes (one of the most salient features of violin music) in such a way as to establish linear connections that cut right across the spans of orthodox Schenkerian analysis, and in this way link remote and - in Schenkerian terms - unconnected points;s8 the most obvious instance in Ex. 14 of such a ‘surface prolongation’, if it may be called that, is a progression that begins with d3 at bars 18-19 (a), continues through the ch3 at bar 28 (b), and reaches b2 at bar 36 (c).

From a Schenkerian viewpoint, of course, this looks like the worst kind of analysis-by-dots, picking out the notes at random without regard to the underlying voice-leading - the sort of thing that beginners do before they learn better. At the same time, these notes, and hence the connections between them, do have a particular salience. The d3 is the highest pitch in the movement (it resumes the register established in both versions near the opening, at bar 4) and is given considerable emphasis through its downbeat position at bar 19, where it marks the first perfect cadence of the movement, as well as the falling seventh by which it is quitted. The rhyming cadence at bars 42-3 (Ex. 14d) similarly emphasises the b2, which is continually harped upon during the last ten bars of the movement. As for the ch3, this not only forms a link between the d3 and b2 but also gains emphasis from its registral isolation, underlined by the fall of a tritone to the next note, f#2. It will not do for the analyst to dismiss

Ex. 14 Op. 5 No. 1, fourth movement

(a) Bars 18-20 (b) Bars 27-9



these as purely surface phenomena, because that is exactly the point: unlike the standard Schenkerian model according to which elements of musical design (not only register but also thematic organisation, texture, orchestration, dynamics and so forth) serve to project underlying structure,89 the graces in Ex. 14 set surface salience against voice-leading derivation. And in this way they illustrate, in miniature, a principle with general application: performers have the options of working in line with the compositional structure as represented by structural analysis, such as Schenkerian analysis proper, or of working against it.

We might dramatise what is happening in Ex. 14 as an encounter between Corelli-the-composer and Corelli-the-performer, even as we recognise the fict- ive status of these personae: Corelli-the-performer is playfully linking surface elements to create a quasi-prolongational pattern at odds with Corelli-the- composer’s, resulting in an effect of what might be termed structural hetero- phony. And this is not an isolated case, for the use of register to create large-scale connections at odds with underlying structure seems to be a consistent feature of Corelli’s graces (it is far less prominent in the graces other musicians added to Op. 5). Indeed there is further example of this in Ex. 14, this time focused around the rhyming cadences at bars 19-20 and 42-3. Although there is in each case an underlying descent from 6 to I, in the 1700 version the two cadences do not in any way rhyme with one another; instead, the cadence in the relative major at bars 19-20 rhymes with the subdominant cadence at bars 28-9. The music divides into phrases but not really into formal sections; it comes over, in other words, as through-composed. But all this changes in the 1710 version, where the final cadence in the tonic at bars 42-3 echoes the relative major one at bars 19-20. In effect, the movement becomes a binary one - and this binary form is the creation of Corelli-the-performer, not Corelli-the-composer. What is happening here is rather like what we saw in the very first example, the Adagio from Op. 9 No. 3, except for one crucial difference: there Corelli-the-performer was giving a surface expression to a structure that Corelli-the-composer hinted at, whereas here the two Corellis are creating quite different - indeed mutually exclusive - forms. In a nutshell, Corelli-the-performer is shouting down Corelli- the-composer. We hear both their voices, though one is louder than the other.

Ex. 14 (cont.)

(c) Bars 35-8

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(d) Bars 41-3

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The fact (if fact it is) that in this case the composer and the performer are the same individual only testifies to the dialogic nature of the music and, if I am right, of any music in performance. And the fact that we can use an analytical process derived, in however inverted a manner, from Schenker to demonstrate this might suggest that what we tend to see as the monologic quality of his vision of music has less to do with his theories as originally formulated than with the way they were transformed and applied after his death, particularly in North America. It was after all Schenker, whom we see as the high priest of musical unity and therefore the devotee of inter-level conformance, who referred to ‘the principle of inner tension’ as ‘the highest principle which is common to all arts’.90 But then, it is in the nature of looking glasses that you can never be quite sure which is the real image and which is the inverted one.

VI

I suggested that, in the common-practice style, underlying structures typically function as the intersection set between different versions of what we call ‘the same’ piece, thereby providing a material substrate for cultural ascriptions of ‘sameness’. And I suggested that it was because of this that Schenkerian analysis is useful in analysing the variants of Corelli’s Op. 5. But there is one essential respect in which the underlying structure, when seen this way, deviates from the Schenkerian model. If the relationship between any two versions generates an underlying structure that represents what the creator of one sees as essential in the other, then different pairings of versions will result in different structures; as Boorman emphasises, and as we saw with the Manchester versions of Op. 5 No. 8, different musicians make different decisions as to what is essential and what is contingent. (Naturally I think that the same idea might also be invoked at the subnotational level of performance variance, but I shall not explore that here.) And this conception of the underlying structure as purely relational is entirely at odds with Schenker’s belief in the absolute nature of his structural levels, which he saw as an intrinsic part of the composition and as such immutable.” It is rather like the argument about musical works all over again: whereas the relational structure I am proposing changes with each pair of versions and so creates a family resemblances organisation, the invariance of Schenker’s structural levels is a counterpart of the Romantic/modernist conception of the musical work. And this is hardly surprising, given that Schenker developed his theory of levels precisely as a means of securing the concept of the autonomous musical work against the depredations of Wagnerian music drama and the advance of programmatic music in general.92

Schenker predicated his theory of levels on the chord of nature, the major triad; the Urlinie takes the shape it does, and in consequence generates the middleground and foreground that it does, because that is how God has made

6 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999 Music Analysis, 18hi (1999)


the world. It is this identification of the theory with how the world is that leads Schenker to see his structural levels as intrinsic to the musical work. But even in their conventional application to a single, authorised text, Schenker’s structural levels represent not an absolute but the result of an act of comparison. Here, however, the comparison is not between two versions of ‘the same’ work; it is between the musical work itself - understood, that is, as immutable and transcendant - and something quite different, namely the system of species counterpoint as codified by Fux (and corrected, of course, by Schenker himself). 93 According to Schenker, species counterpoint embodies, in a concise form, the universal principles of voice leading which inform, or should inform, the music of all times and places. But it would be more reasonable to see his analytical appropriation of strict voice-leading as a means of representation that, in effect, draws a comparison between the individually elaborated surfaces of free compositions and the normative constructs of species counterpoint. Schenkerian analysis is, in other words, a form of transcription, in the sense in which Pandora Hopkins has defined this term: ‘a comparison of that which is unfamiliar to that which is familiar’.94 (Once again the historical nature of Schenkerian analysis emerges, since what is familiar will vary from time to time as well as from place to place.) Or to put it another way, Schenker’s structural levels represent the musical surface filtered through species counterpoint; they are in this sense intersection sets. And if we are instead inclined to think of them as intrinsic to the music, the reason is simply that the principles of species counterpoint are so familiar to us that we do not notice them, in just the same way that we do not hear our own speech accents (and therefore assume that it is only other people who have them). To train as a Schenkerian analyst precisely means learning to perceive music through what Peter Rabinowia would call the ‘attributive grid’ of species counterpoint,95 and becoming so used to perceiving it this way that it seems simply natural to do so.

And it is here that the parallel to be drawn between Schenkerian analysis and Corelli’s original notations of the Op. 5 slow movements is so suggestive. Writ- ing in the early nineteenth century, Pierre Baillot observed that Corelli’s notations were ‘not only simple, but could even be called bare’;96 in his introduction to Geminiani’s Art of Playing on the Violin, David Boyden speaks of their apparent ‘austerity’ - an appearance, he adds, which is controverted by the style of the extant performing versions. But the austerity was never in the music; it was in the way in which Corelli communicated it to the performer. Read literally, the original slow movements of Op. 5 are positively anachronistic; melodic motion is registrally limited and proceeds largely by step, dissonances are few and in general carefully prepared, and the two parts are essentially equal. It would be going too far to say that Corelli’s notations look like something out of Gradus ad Parnassum (which, incidentally, was first published just twenty-five years after Op. 5), but they have something of the appearance of late renaissance or


222 NICHOLAS COOK

early baroque bicinias, for example. The graced versions, on the other hand, make it abundantly clear that the music as performed had almost exactly the opposite properties: they are registrally expansive and contain many leaps, there are often striking dissonances, and the two parts are anything but equal. Just as in Schenkerian analysis, one kind of music is being used to represent another, and the result is in each case to focus attention on the differences between the two. The content of Schenkerian analysis lies, properly speaking, in the transformations that differentiate one structural level from another; in the same way, the effect of Corelli’s slow movement notations is to highlight what is not on the page, and so to create what might be called an arena for the articulation of musical difference - difference between the score and the performance, and between one performance and another.

Earlier, I spoke of arrangements in terms of the dynamic encounter between an instrumental or vocal medium and an abstract idea; we might give this a Schenkerian gloss by saying that the surface represents the encounter between medium and underlying structure. That makes sense in terms of both the graced versions of Op. 5, with their idiomatically violinistic elaborations, and the arrangements for recorder or string orchestra which I have described. But it poses a conundrum in respect of the original notations of the slow movements. As I said, these are musical surfaces, however minimalist by comparison with the graced versions; they contain their own elaborations, as we can see from the way in which these are sometimes eliminated in the graced versions. And yet the original notations are not for performance; ‘To play such a movement as written’, says Neumann, ‘amounts to a misrepresentation’.97 The music is not, in any literal sense, written for the violin at all. Then for what medium are the original notations intended? The answer, I suppose, is obvious, at least as soon as it has been stated: they are intended for the musical eye. They are graphic scores; scores, that is, designed not for literal execution, but for seeing, or better, for seeing through.You read the music, and then you don’t play it; you play something quite different, but based on it.

The parallel with Schenkerian notation makes it possible to express this less paradoxically. Like Corelli’s scores, Schenker’s graphs are for reading, not for playing. Building on the familiar appearance of species counterpoint, they function as a visual representation of abstract structure and compositional design. And as such they serve as a means of engaging the reader, and in particular the performer, with the music’s underlying structure. For it was one of Schenker’s most deeply-held convictions that the middleground is the necessary and indeed the only source of articulate performance; that is why he inveighed against the classics-made-easy approach of editors like Hans von Billow, who spelt out patterns of ornamentation and added dynamic and articulatory markings so that you could play the music from their editions without having the least understanding of it. 9s (He was equally dismissive of von Biilow’s playing, and that



of the other virtuosi whom he saw as rattling off the notes at high speed without ever penetrating beneath the surface of the music they played.) Schenker’s own editions eschew any such short-cuts; as William Rothstein has explained,99 the fundamental premise of Schenker’s philosophy of performance was that, within the highly demanding framework of the musical content, performers have to make interpretational decisions for themselves.They must, in this sense, be guided by the spirit of improvisation. And in all these respects - the need to base performance on an understanding of compositional structure, the need for performers to make their own choices, and the need for them to do so with every appearance of spontaneity - Schenker’s philosophy of performance betrays its eighteenth-century origins.

As John Rink has shown,loO it was through Bach’s I&z&z that Schenker re- ceived this tradition. I have elsewhere suggested that Bach’s dictum ‘Play from the soul, not like a trained bird!‘, which Schenker quoted with approbation in his Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation, might be translated into Schen- kerian terms so as to read ‘Play from the background, not like a virtuoso!‘.101 And Bach’s dictum links in turn with other eighteenth-century characterisa- tions of performance, such as Quantz’s statement in a chapter entitled ‘On the Manner of Playing the Adagio’ that ‘that which does not come from the heart does not easily reach the heart’;lo2 maybe a Schenkerian translation would be ‘that which does not come from the background cannot achieve true coherence’. For Schenker, then, the insights which eighteenth-century perfomers expressed through a vocabulary of feeling could be renewed by means of a twentieth-century language of structure designed to give perfomers access to what he called the ‘secret . . . of organic coherence’; that is why he wrote that ‘the concept of background, middleground, and foreground is of decisive and practical importance for performance’. lo3 (It is also why the anachronism of applying Schenkerian analysis to late baroque music is arguably more apparent than real.) But there is one eighteenth-century source that perhaps represents a more decisive and practical attempt than any other to thrust the performer into the arena of musical creation: the edition of Op. 5 that was inscribed on the first day of the century, and that denied the performer a musical surface that was capable of literal execution. Through his critical editions and analytical reductions, Schenker encouraged performers to engage with underlying structure; Corelli simply gave them no choice.

NOTES 1. My thanks to Laurie Stras, Jose Bowen, and various anonymous referees for their

comments on this article, which incorporates some materials I presented in a round table session at the Symposium of the International Musicological Society, Ma- drid, 1992; published as ‘Heinrich Schenker, Anti-historicist’, Revista de Musico- logia, 16 (1993 [1994]),pp. 24-36.


224 NICHOLAS COOK

2. See in particular the three articles, one by each member of the Trio Veracini, published in Early Music, 24 (1996): John Holloway, ‘Corelli’s Op. 5: Text, Act . . . and Reaction’ (pp. 63%40), David Watkin, ‘Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas: “Violino e Cio- lone o Cimbalo”?’ (pp. 64%63), and Lars Ulrik Mortensen, “‘UnerringlyTaste- ful”?: Harpsichord Continuo in Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas’ (pp. 665-79).

3. This edition was issued in Amsterdam by the publishing houses Roger and Mor- tier; a pirate edition was published by Walsh and Hare in London. There has been disagreement about when it first appeared. Hans-Peter Schmitz (Die Kunst der Kxzierung im 18. Juhrhundert (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1955), p. 30), Frederick Neu- mann (Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, with Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 557) and Robert Don- ington (Baroque Music: Style and Performance (London: Faber, 1982), p. 103) all suggest a date around 1715, after Corelli’s death, though elsewhere Donington revises this to c. 1712 (review of Rangel-Ribeiro’s ‘Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer’, Music and Letters, 63 (1982), p. 3 13). On the other hand Marc Pincherle (CoreZZi (New York: Norton, 1956), pp. 1 loff.), Hans Joachim Marx (‘Some Unknown Embellishments of Corelli’sViolin Sonatas’, The Musical Quar- terly, 61 (1975), pp. 65-76 (74)) and David Boyden (‘Corelli’s SoloViolin Sonatas “Grac’d” by Dubourg’, in Festskrzj? Jens Peter Lursen (Copenhagen: Hansen, 1972), pp. 113-25 (113)) favour an earlier date; this is clearly correct, for Marx cites an advertisement for the Roger edition that appeared in an Amsterdam journal in May 1710, while advertisements for the Walsh edition appeared in December 17 11 (William C. Smith, A Bibliography of the Musical Works Published by John Walsh Dur- ing the Years 1695-l 720 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1968), p. 119). In his catalogue ruisonee Marx assigns the Roger and Mortier editions to 17 10, and the Walsh and Hare one to the following year (Hans Joachim Marx, Arcangelo Corelli: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der musikalischen Werke. Supplementband: Die ober- lieferung der Werke Arcangelo Corellis. Cataloge raisorke (Koln: Arno Volk Verlag - Hans Gerig KC, 1980), nos. 11, 12 and 14 respectively, pp. 176-7). In this article I refer collectively to the Roger, Mortier, and Walsh and Hare editions as the 17 10 version. The so-called &text edition of Joachim and Chrysander (reissued in Lea Pocket Scores) is taken from the Mortier edition and includes the ornaments; facsimile reproductions of some of the slow movements, taken from the Roger edition, may be found on pp. 55-6 1 of Schmitz’s book. The long-awaited third volume of the Corelli Gesamtausgube, which is to be published by Laaber-Verlag and will contain Op. 5, had still not appeared as this article went to press. Also in preparation (for Oxford University Press) is an edition of Op. 5 which will include all the ornamented and otherwise varied versions of the sonatas, edited by Neal Zaslaw and Robert E. Seletsky. Most modern recordings of Op. 5 are based on the 17 10 version.

4. Pincherle, Corelli, p. 110; Marx, Catalogue raisonie, p. 176.

5. Mary Chan and Jamie C. Kassler (eds.), Roger North’s The Musical1 Grammarian, 1728 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 167; Johann Joachim Quantz, Krsuch einer Anweisung die F&e traversiere zu Spielen (Berlin, J. F. Voi3, 1752), translated by Edward R. Reilly as On PZuying the Flute (2nd edn, NewYork: Schirmer Books, 1985), pp. 179-80.



6. Pincherle, Core& pp. 111-14; Francesco Geminiani, The Art of Playing on the Vio- lin, ed. David Boyden (London: Oxford University Press, n.d.), p. vi; Robin Stowell, Violin Technique and Per,+ormance Practice in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 340;Victor Rangel- Ribeiro, Baroque Music: A Practical Guide for the Performer (New York: Schirmer, 198 l), p. 118; Zaslaw, ‘Ornaments for Corelli’s Violin Sonatas, Op. 5’ (Early Mu- sic, 24 (1996), pp. 95-l 15), pp. 103-5.

7. Donington, Baroque Music: Style and Performance, p. 94; Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (London: Dent, 1948), p. 233; Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, pp. 557-8. Bukofzer speaks of the ‘strangely rhap- sodic taste’ of the ornamentation; Neumann goes further, saying that ‘the lavish- ness of the coloraturas . . . often create[s] a feeling of imbalance’, and contrasting this with the ‘far greater reserve and a better balance between structural and ornamental elements’ of Geminiani’s written-out ornamentations, which he describes as a ‘lesson . . . in modesty’. Neumann’s loaded vocabulary (which sets ‘reserve’ and ‘modesty’ against ‘luxuriance’ and ‘exaggerations’) prejudges his argument about the authorship of the 17 10 edition, which in effect boils down to the questionable assertion that present-day concepts of the ‘balance between between structural and ornamental elements’ constitute a viable criterion for distinguishing between the practice of outstanding musicians and lesser lights of the Baroque period.

8. Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, p. 572.

9. Schenker’s Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik was originally published by Universal Edi- tion,Vienna, in 1904. An English translation by Hedi Siegel of the revised (1908) edition appeared in The Music Forum, 4 (1976), pp. 1-139.

10. The tables in Zaslaw’s ‘Ornaments for Corelli’sViolin Sonatas’, pp. 97-9, update the formerly authoritative list of ornamented versions and arrangements in Marx’s Catalogue raisonee, pp. 3 14-25 (see also Seletsky, ‘18th-Century Variations’, pp. 128-9, for a list of variations). No such listing can long remain complete, and Zaslaw’s article was followed within a few months by H. Diack Johnstone’s ‘Yet More Ornaments for Corelli’s Violin Sonatas, Op. 5’ (Early Music, 24 (1996), pp. 623-33); mention might also be made of the Spanish version mentioned in Craig Russell, ‘An Investigation into Arcangelo Corelli’s Influence on Eighteenth-Century Spain’, Current Musicology, 34 (1982), pp. 42-52.There are a few anomalies; in his preface to the Moeck edition of the 1707 arrangement for recorder (see n. 16 below) Gerhard Braun advises the performer to study the ornamented version by Nicola Matteis once owned by Quantz but assumed to be lost (see Zaslaw, p. 96), while Donington quotes a few bars from what he calls ‘Corelli’s playing version’ of Op. 5 No. 9, adding that this was communicated privately to him by Sol Babitz (Baroque Music: Style and Performance, p. 104).

11. Christopher Wintle, ‘Corelli’s Tonal Models: The Trio-Sonata Op. III, n. 1’) in Sergio Durante and Pierluigi Petrobelli (eds.), Nuovissimi Studi Corelliani (Flor- ence: Leo S. Olschki, 1982), pp. 29-69 (p. 31).

12. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).

Music Analysis, 18lii (1999) c? Blackwell Pubhshers Ltd. 1999

226 NICHOLAS COOK

13. Stephen Hefling, “‘Of the Manner of Playing the Adagio”: Structural Levels and Performance Practice in Quantz’s Krsuch’, Journal of Music Theory, 3 1 (1987), pp. 205-23.

14. Ibid., p. 217.

15. Zbid.,p. 213.

16. This transcription is no. 2 in Marx’s Catalogue ruisonie, where details of the advertisement are given (pp. 324-5); Zaslaw refers to it as the ‘Pez Anon’, and suggests that the ‘eminent Master’ may have been either John Paisible or John Loeillet (‘Or- naments for Corelli’sViolin Sonatas’, pp. 99, 114 n. 29). It is published by Moeck Verlag (Edition Moeck No. 2526) and has been recorded by Franz Briiggen and Conrad Steinmann.

17. Zaslaw, ‘Ornaments for Corelli’s Violin Sonatas’, p. 102.

18. Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 166.

19. One might in addition conceivably argue for a motivic connection between the semiquaver rise from g2 to c3 in the 17 10 version of bar 18 and the linkage of g1 and c2 that forms a major topic of the second half of the movement (from the g’ of bar 10 on), as for instance at bars 14-15 (bass) and 20-21 (violin, with octave displacements resulting in sevenths); indeed the semiquaver rise could be seen as a diminution of the simultaneous quaver rise to c1 in the bass. But even if admitted as significant, such motivic reflections (which involve the temporal displacement that is the hallmark of the Schenkerian middleground) do not seem to be a prominent feature of the graces.

20. An exeption, perhaps, is the ascent to d3 which Walsh’s master adds in bar 2 1; this means that there is a registral descent to the final cadence, as in the original version, despite the recorder’s limited range which forces it to end on c2 instead of cl.

2 1. Most of the performers who adopt the 1710 graces leave these bars as written, with the exception of Catherine Mackintosh who continues the ornamentation; see the discussion of this passage in PeterWalls, ‘Performing Corelli’sViolin Sona- tas, Op. 5’ (Early Music, 24 (1996), pp. 133-42), p. 138.

22. No. 11 in Marx’s list of manuscript versions, though no MS has survived (Cata- logue r&son&, p. 323); the whole sonata is reprinted on pp. 62-9 of Schmitz’s an- thology, and has been recorded by the Locatelli Trio.

23. On p. 75 (‘Some Unknown Embellishments’), Marx gave a spectacular graph col- lating all the graced versions of the opening two bars of this movement known to him.This graph is reproduced in Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance Practice, p. 340; Zaslaw provides a similar graph covering the entire movement (‘Orna- ments for Corelli’s Violin Sonatas’, pp. 100-l 04).

24. Walls, ‘Performing Corelli’sViolin Sonatas’, p. 138.

25. Boyden reproduces the equivalent passage (bars 27-30) of Dubourg’s performing version of this movement in ‘Corelli’s Solo Violin Sonatas “Grac’d” by Dubourg’, p. 120 (the opening may be found on p. 601 of his article ‘The Corelli “Solo” Sonatas and their Ornamental Additions by Corelli, Geminiani, Dubourg,Tartini,



and the “Walsh Anonymous”‘, Musica Antiqua ZZZ: Acta Sckntifica (Bydgoszcz: Byd- goskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1972), pp. 591-607, as well as on pp. 118-19 of Pincherle’s book). Dubourg’s version (no. 9 in Marx’s list of MSS, p. 322 in the Catalogue raisonke) is much less distinctive than Geminiani’s - in effect he relies on scalar filling of Corelli’s leaps - but the aim appears to be the same: to turn what Corelli wrote into a motivically consistent theme. Another version, clearly modelled on Geminiani’s, is the recently-discovered one by Geminiani’s pupil Michael Festing (reproduced in Johnstone, ‘Yet More Ornaments’, Ex. 3).

26. Marx (‘Some Unknown Embellishments’, p. 67), referring to the altered (but not ornamented) version of the first two movements from Op. 5 No. 2 in a manuscript in the Henry Watson Music Library, Manchester; see below, n. 4 1.

27. Geminiani’s Concerto Gross0 based on Op. 5 No. 3 is published in a modern edition by NagelsVerlag (Nagels Musik-Archiv No. 2 1 l).The first edition is listed as no. 3 in Marx’s list of published arrangements (Catalogue raisonke, pp. 3 15-l 6).

28. Burney, A General History of Music,Vol. 2, p. 993; quoted by Susan Kirakowska in her survey of Geminiani’s arrangements and revisions of his own and other people’s compositions (‘Geminiani the Editor’, The Music Review, 44 (1983), pp. 13-24).

29. London, 1667.

30. No. 1 in Marx’s list of manuscript arrangements (Catalogue raisonke, p, 323).

3 1. Francesco Maria Veracini, Zwiilf Sonaten nach Arcangelo Core&, Opus 5, ed. Walter Kolneder, 4 ~01s. (Mainz: Schott, 196 1). For a warning concerning the accuracy of this edition see John Walter Hill, The Life and Works of Francesco Maria Veracini (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), n. 775.

32. See Mary Gray White, ‘F. M. Veracini’s “Dissertazioni sopra 1’Opera Quinta de1 Corelli”‘, The Music Review, 32 (1971), pp. l-26; John Walter Hill, The Life and Works of Francesco Maria Veracini, chap. 18.

33. For completeness I should add that the violin melody at bar 1O’-2 and both the lower violin notes and the bass at bars 103-4 of Veracini’s version correspond to bars g3 to lo2 of Corelli’s original.

34. White, ‘F. M.Veracini’s “Dissertazioni”‘, p. 1.

35. Translated in John Walter Hill, ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude of F. M. Vera&i (in John Walter Hill (ed.), Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1980), pp. 15%96), p. 188. In ‘Corelli’s Tonal Models’, Wintle remarks on the decorative rather than structural qualities of Corelli’s fugal themati- cism.

36. Hill, ‘The Life and Works’, p. 287. In brief, the first group of entries is followed (after a half-bar extension) by a second group in which entries continue to alternate between violin and bass but occur at different tonal levels and at diminishing intervals, culminating in a climactic section that consists of three repetitions of the first four notes of the head motive in sequence. This leads with a clear sense of home-coming to a brief final section consisting of two entries, both in the tonic, in stretto; Veracini’s movement bears the traces of the beginning-middle-end paradigm associated with the sonata style in a way that Corelli’s does not.


228 NICHOLAS COOK

37. Preface to ZwiiEf Sonaten nach Arcangelo Corelli, Opus 5.

38. Hill, ‘The Life and Works’, p. 287; see also ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude’, p. 188.

39. Hill, ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude’, p. 196. Hill’s account ofveracini’s retrospective and in this sense neo-classicising reception of Corelli can be profitably read in the context of Dennis Libby’s suggestive remarks about the eighteenth-century construction of ‘the meek, timid, and gentle character of Corelli’, as Burney put it (‘Interrelationships in Corelli’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 26 (1973), pp. 263-287).

40. The Bologna manuscript generally lacks figures in the bass, eliminates dynamic and bowing indications together with Corelli’s ‘arpeggio’ markings, and contains a number of terminal copying errors (Hill, Life and Works, p. 287; White, ‘F. M. Veracini’s “Dissertazioni”‘, p. 9). It should be noted that it is not an autograph.

41. In ‘Some Unknown Embellishments’ Marx describes the recomposed version of the first two movements from Op. 5 No. 2 contained in a MS in the HenryWatson Music Library, Manchester, and putatively attributes it to Corelli’s pupil Pietro Castrucci (an attribution which Zaslaw does not accept). But while he comments that ‘the compositional structure has been tampered with’ (p. 67), he does not observe that these reworkings are closely related to Veracini’s; indeed they are far closer to Veracini than to Corelli. And it is striking that the largest number of deviations occur at the point which appears to have givenveracini most trouble in his reworking (the ‘Fuga di cinque note’ in the second movement, of which the ‘Dissertazioni’ include two versions, both included in the Kolneder edition; see White, ‘F. M.Veracini’s “Dissertazioni”’ , pp. 2%6).The conclusion must be either that the Manchester versions represent somebody’s subsequent reworkings of the ‘Dissertazioni’, or else that they record a transitional stage in Veracini’s own reworkings. In either case the question arises as to what they are doing in a manuscript which is in the hand of Handel’s amanuensis, John Christopher Smith, and was probably at one time part of Handel’s music library (Marx, ‘Some Unknown Embellishments’, pp. 66-7). The link between the Handel circle and the ‘Dis- sertazioni’, which are not otherwise known to have circulated inveracini’s lifetime, suggests that they may have originated from the period of Veracini’s residence in London (1733-45), while the evidence of watermarks indicates that the Manches- ter manuscripts date from 1748-50 (‘Some Unknown Embellishments’, p. 68). The date of composition may then have been significantly earlier than that of the Bologna MS, which Hill assigns to about 1760 - the same time as the treatise (Life and Works, p. 82). Two further points may be made. The first is that, unlike the Bologna MS, the Manchester MS appears to have been intended for performance (there is a WZti marking at the end of the first movement). The second is that the connection between Veracini and the Manchester version of the movements of Op. 5 No. 2 may have implications for the authorship of the ornamented (not recomposed) versions of movements from sonatas 7-11 contained in the same manuscript. I am grateful to Manchester Public Libraries for making available a microfilm of the MS, the call number of which is MS 130 Hd 4 v.3 13.

42. See White, ‘F. M. Veracini’s “Dissertazioni”’ , pp. 9, 15. White seems at times per- plexed by the lack of consistency inveracini’s procedures; ‘Veracini’s preferences’,


SCHENKER,~ORELLIAND THE GRACES 229

she remarks (specifically in relation to his use of non-harmonic notes), ‘cannot always be accurately determined’ (p. 7).

43. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works:An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

44. Ibid., pp. 200-203. For an argument that the concept of the musical work is implicit in musical practice prior to 1800, see Harry White, ‘ “If It’s Baroque, Don’t Fix It”: Reflections on Lydia Goehr’s “Work-Concept” and the Historical Integ- rity of Musical Composition’, Acta Musicologica, 59 (1997), pp. 94-104.

45. See, in particular, GaryTomlinson, ‘Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer’, Current Musicology, 53 (1993), pp. 18-24.

46. The general position advanced here is familiar from Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Cricitism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983); for a musicological application, see Jeffrey Kallberg, ‘Are Variants a Problem? “Composer’s Intentions” in Editing Chopin’, Chopin Studies 3 (The International Musicological Symposium ‘Chopin and Romanticism’, 17-23 October 1986; Warsaw: Frederick Chopin Society, 1990), pp. 257-67, republished with minor changes as ‘The Cho- pin “Problem”: Simultaneous Variants and Alternate Versions’, chap. 7 of Kall- berg’s Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). In his book (pp. 4-5), Kallberg also advances a similar argument regarding the social construction of genre, which he links to the concept of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’ (see n. 7 1 below).

47. On the neutral level and material trace see Jean-Jaques Nattiez, Music and Dis- course: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 12; for a fuller explanation of the concept of musical affordance see Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 96-7.


49. An example is the Manchester manuscript mentioned in n. 4 1 above, which contains three versions of the Sarabanda from Op. 5 No. 8 (see Ex. 12) along with two of several other movements.

50. Heinrich Schenker, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster, Free Composition (NewYork: Long- man, 1979),Vol. 1, p. 68.

5 1. Schenker specifically anticipates this objection near the beginning of chap. 1: ‘A particular form of the fundamental structure by no means requires particular prolongations; if it did, all forms of the fundamental structure would have to lead to the same prolongational forms’ (Free Composition,Vol. 1, p. 25). For a discussion of this passage (with a different translation), see Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretive Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1997), p. 98.

52. Allen Forte and Steven E. Gilbert, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis (NewYork: Norton, 1982), p. 320.

53. I have discussed this in a pedagogical context in Analysis through Composition (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 6; see also Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 64-5.


230 NICHOLAS COOK

54. ‘Arrangement as Analysis’,Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 1 (1987), pp. 77-89.

55. This is also true of several versions of the slow movements from Op. 5 that I do not discuss in this article, among them those ofTartini (Padua, Biblioteca Antoniana, MS 1896, no. 6 in the list of ornamented MS versions in Marx’s Catalogue rai- sonLe) and the so-called ‘Cambridge Anonymous’ (Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 7059, no. 2 in Marx’s list); my thanks to the respective libraries for sup- plying copies.


57. This position resonates with Libby’s general claim about Corelli that ‘Very often one feels that the music is similar to something used elsewhere because it is the underlying harmonic progression and the way that it fits into the overall tonal format that really interests Corelli much more than the surface character of the music’; in ‘Corelli’s Tonal Models’, Wintle might be seen as providing a theoretical framework for Libby’s informal observations. Libby’s implied association of underlying structure and work identity is undermined, however, by his subsequent statement that ‘often in Corelli’s music one feels similarities of differing degrees of preciseness of harmonic and tonal design and of skeletal pitch outline between movements or parts of them’ (‘Interrelationships’, pp. 267,279).

58. Forte and Gilbert, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis, p. 321.

59. No. 5 in Marx’s list of MS elaborations (Catalogue raisonke, p. 322); see n. 41 above.

60. Burney, A General History ofMusic,Vol. 2, p. 443.

61. Carl Schachter, ‘Either/Or’, in Hedi Siegel (ed.), Schenker Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 165-79.

62. Stanley Boorman, ‘The MusicalText’ (in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 403-23), p. 4 16.

63. Ibid., p. 422.

64. Ibid., p. 422; my emphasis.

65. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’ (Critical Zn- quiry, 7 (1980), pp. 213-36), p. 216.

66. Ibid., p. 220.

67. Ibid., p. 221; Smith’s emphases.

68. Ibid., p. 218.

69. Jose A. Bowen, ‘The History of Remembered 1nnovation:Tradition and its Role in the Relationship between Musical Works and their Performances’ uournal ofMu- sicology, 11 (1993), pp. 139-73), p. 147.

70. Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology 1935-75 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 3 16. Harold Powers attributes a similar structure to what, by association with Goehr’s work-concept, he calls the ‘raga-concept’ of Indian classical music (Harold Powers, ‘Musical Historiography from an Other Perspective’, in ‘Round Table IV: Historiography’, Acta Musicologica, 59 (1997), pp. 25-8). For a



general discussion of these issues in a cross-cultural context, see Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), chaps. 7 and 8.

7 1. Wittgenstein develops the concept of family resemblances in the course of a well- known discussion of games, in which he argues that there is no one feature that all games have in commmon, but that any game has features that it shares with other games, in the same way that members of a family look like one another even though there may be no single characteristic that they all share (Ludwig Wittgen- stein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), pp. 3 l-2). Lydia Goehr discusses family resemblances in relation to what she calls the ‘open concept’ of the musical work (The Imaginary Museum, pp. 90-95, see also p. 62); others to invoke family resemblances in this context include Jose Bowen, who applies it to jazz standards (‘The History of Remembered Innovation’, pp. 145%7), and Judith Etzion and Susana Weich-Shahak (“‘Family Resemblan- ces” and Variability in the Sephardic Romancero: A Methodological Approach to Variantal Comparison’, Journal of Music Theory, 37 (1993), pp. 267-309).

72. I have suggested elsewhere that the Schenkerian model of large-scale musical form is best understood as reflecting historical patterns of compositional imagination, basing my argument on the discrepancies between this model and perceptual data (‘The perception of large-scale tonal closure’, Music Perception, 5 (1987), pp. 197-205).

73. A similar representation is used by Etzion and Weich-Shahak in “‘Family Resem- blances” andvariability’; Etzion and Weich-Shahak’s networks include a variety of distinct parameters, each of which is shown by a different kind of line, rather than attempting to summate their effect in the manner of Fig. 1.

74. Kurt von Fischer, ‘The Interpretation of Musical Sources’ (Fontes Artis Musicae, 19 (1972), pp. 148-54), p. 154.

7 5. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum, chap. 5.

76. Heinrich Schenker (trans. and ed. John Rothgeb), Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:A Portrayal of its Musical Content, with Running Commentary on Performance and Lit- erature As Well (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1992), p. 4.

77. Lawrence Zbikowski, ‘Musical Coherence and Categorization: Prospects for Mu- sic Theory’ (unpublished paper), following Eleanor Rosch (for whom the typical bird is the robin!).

78. For an overview see Goehr, The Imaginary Museum, chap. 3.

79. Lawrence Rosenwald, ‘Theory,Text-Setting, and Performance’ uournul ofMusicology, 11 (1993), pp. 52-65), p. 62. I have previously explored some of the ramifications of this formulation in ‘Music Minus One: Rock,Theory, and Performance’ (New Form- ations, 27 (1995-6), pp. 23-41), p. 38, and ‘Analysing Performance and Perform- ing Analysis’ (in Cook and Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, pp. 239-6 I), p. 245.

80. Boorman, ‘The MusicalText’, p. 4 17.

8 1. Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 17.

Music Analysis, 1 S/ii (1999) 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999

232 NICHOLAS COOK

82. There is obviously an issue here of the relationship between these scores and actual performances - including performances by their authors. For one thing, some of these notated versions were no doubt produced for pedagogical purposes - to act as models for less expert players - and pedagogical representations often have a decidedly non-linear relationship to the practices they represent. For another, there is the paradox that, since free ornamentation was ideally spontanous, any performance which simply followed written-out notation would by definition be less than ideal. Such recalcitrant questions, which might be focused around Bowen’s distinction between the ‘sample’ and the ‘summary’ (‘The History of Remem- bered Innovation’, p. 160) and Zaslaw’s distinction between manuscript and published music (‘Ornaments for Corelli’sViolin Sonatas’, p. 109), are highly germane for the history of performance practice, but I shall not pursue them here.

83. Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989).

84. See, for instance, John Rink, review of Berry’s Musical Structure and Per$ormance, Music Analysis, 9 (1990), pp. 319-39; Joel Lester, ‘Performance and Analysis: Interaction and Interpretation’, in John Rink (ed.), The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 197-216; Nicholas Cook, ‘Analysing Performance and Performing Analysis’.

85. Kevin Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dia- logue’ (in Cook and Everist (eds.), RethinkingMusic, pp. 5%72), p. 60.

86. See above, p. 204.

87. Schenker, Free Composition,Vol. 1, p. 56, of apparent parallel fifths and octaves: ‘Composer and listener meet in the understanding of the true situation, which is contained in the middleground.’

88. Although conceived independently, the connections I am talking about bear a ge- neric resemblance to the ‘linear ascents’ described by Robert Fink in ‘Arrows of Desire: Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy’ (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1994).

89. Classic statements include Ernst Oster, ‘Register and the Large-Scale Connec- tion’ and John Rothgeb, ‘Design as a Key to Structure in Tonal Music’, both in MauryYeston (ed.), Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches (New Ha- ven:Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 54-71,72-93.

90. Schenker, Free CompositioqVol. 1, p. xxiv.

91. ‘The musical examples [i.e. reductions] which accompany this volume are not merely practical aids; they have the same power and conviction as the visual aspect of the printed composition itself (the foreground). That is, the graphic representation is part of the actual composition, not merely an educational means’ (Free Compo- sition,Vol. 1, p. xxiii, my emphasis).

92. See Nicholas Cook, ‘Heinrich Schenker, Polemicist: a Reading of the Ninth Sym- phony Monograph’, Music Analysis, 14 (1995), pp. 89-105.

93. Fux, then, provides a link on the one hand with Schenker and on the other with


SCHENKER,~ORELLI ANDTHE GRACES 233

94.

95.

96.

97.

98.

99.

the back-to-Palestrina movement represented byveracini’s ‘Dissertazione’; in this way the seventeenth-century ‘neo-severe’ style, as Claude Palisca terms it (‘The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy’, in Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (eds.), The New Monteverdi Companion (London: Faber, 1985), p. 158), provides a context for Schenker’s own brand of twentieth-century retrospection. In this paragraph I am developing an argument that I originally outlined in ‘Music Theory and “Good Comparison”: a Viennese Perspective’ uournal of Music Theory, 33 (1989), pp. 117-41).

Pandora Hopkins, ‘The Purposes of Transcription’ (Ethnomusicology, 10 (1966), pp. 310-17), pp. 311-12.

Peter J. Rabinowitz, ‘Chord and Discourse: Listening Through the Written Word’, in Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Music and Text: CriticaZ Inquiries (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1992), pp. 38-56.

Translated in Stowell, Violin Technique and Performance Practice, p. 353.

Neumann, Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque music, p. 572.

Nicholas Cook, ‘The Editor and the Virtuoso, or Schenker versus Bulow’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (199 l), pp. 78-95.

William Rothstein, ‘Heinrich Schenker as an Interpreter of Beethoven’s Piano So- natas’ (19th-Century Music, 8 (1984), pp. 3-28), p. 24.

100. John Rink, ‘Schenker and Improvisation’, Journal of Music Theory, 37 (1993), pp. l-54.

101. The quotation from C. l? E. Bach’s Wrsuch (Essay on the True Art of Pluying Key- board Instruments, trans. William J. Mitchell (New York: Norton, 1949), p. 150) appears on p. 46 in Schenker’s Contribution to the Study of Ornamentation; see Cook, ‘The Editor and thevirtuoso’, p. 92.

102. Quantz, On Pluying the Flute, p. 163.

103. Schenker, Free Composition,Vol. 1, pp. xxi, 8.


Documents

At the Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces