The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 29 (2023) No. 1

A Performer’s Guide to Transcribing, Editing, and Arranging Early Music. By Alon Schab. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. [ix, 276 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-760066-5.]

Reviewed by Alexander Dean*

1. Introduction

2. Schab’s Approach (Pro and Con)

3. Improvisation

4. Patterns of Consumption

5. Arranging and Composing

6. Concluding Remark

References

1. Introduction

1.1 As the title suggests, this book is not aimed at the musicological tradition of editing pieces for collected works editions and the like, but rather promotes a different sort of active creative engagement with early music. Tellingly, “editing” is only one part of the titular list—alongside “transcribing” and “arranging”—rather than an umbrella term covering all. Schab’s book, then, does not aim to supplant, complete, or even join the list of existing standard works on scholarly editing and notation, such as (to name only a few) James Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Theodor Dumitrescu et al., Early Music Editing: Principles, Historiography, Future Directions (Brepols, 2013); or Margaret Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta (Routledge, 2002). Instead, as the title (“Performer’s Guide”) also makes clear, Schab’s focus is more on practical strategies for performance and less on scholarly analysis of theoretical issues. In fact, his approach to editing is explicitly “editing one’s own performance materials,” rather than creating editions for posterity. To this end, the Performer’s Guide is set up in a textbook format, with practical exercises, numerous figures and musical examples, clear headings, and a layout conducive to page-flipping and marginal notation.

2. Schab’s Approach (Pro and Con)

2.1 As a perhaps unfortunate consequence of this focus on performance, Schab builds his case for the use of original source material partly by pointing out deficiencies in critical or performing editions. This element of the text, for the most part limited to a portion of the opening chapter, tends towards straw man arguments: modern critical editions are too complicated, or not complicated enough, or cost too much. It is a bit ironic that after a detailed and well-reasoned discussion of notational ambiguities in a period source (for a Van Eyck recorder fantasia)— in which Schab enumerates several elements that cannot be objectively determined but must be resolved by editorial judgment, “making a careful study of each and every note in a source” (p. 27)—he criticizes scholarly editions because “one must spend a considerable amount of time reading the preface, the source descriptions … the editorial policy, and the critical commentary” (p. 29)—that is to say, reading the portions of an edition in which the editor has done the very thing Schab has just finished recommending. This entire rhetorical pose strikes me as unnecessary. Surely the virtues of the original sources can be enumerated without an effort to dissuade performers from using other materials: early music is not a zero-sum game, but rather a concerted effort involving scholarship, performance, and publishing, to different degrees according to different situations. Schab’s somewhat blithe statement (in his representative example of Purcell’s fantazias, for which an autograph manuscript is available online) that “the intricate technique of collating the several secondary sources of the fantazias, however, will not alter the performance significantly, and is therefore beyond the scope of the present book” (p. 6) implies that any performance from an original source is adequate, with critical analysis of multiple sources merely the remit of the “ivory tower.” “Ivory tower” is another straw man he offers in lieu of a more nuanced argument, as is “the spirit of Gesamstsausgabe” (p. 30)—this last being an example of what the late Richard Taruskin called a “mythical Teutonic beast.” I bring these points up partly because they relate to my own work, of course, but also because they contrast with the otherwise clear-eyed summary of early music performance practice Schab offers in his opening chapter. His prose in general steers clear of polemicizing or pandering, and is light-footed enough to engage with the fluidity of the present moment: “bad lip readings” are included as examples of contemporary public engagement, and an endnote to a mention of Napster concedes that most readers of the book were probably not alive when the file-sharing service was active, and that the very term “file-sharing” itself may soon join the ranks of obsolete musical syntax.

2.2 And there is plenty of room today for the kind of work that Schab is championing here—an approach that facilitates creative engagement with early music—so this approach is welcome, even if it comes with a side of brusqueness. This optimistic focus on creativity, indeed, permeates the book as a whole. A short paragraph in the introduction mentions “period composition” (or “style composition”), with the caveat that although Schab does not endorse or subscribe to criticisms of this practice based on outdated notions of musical creativity (i.e., that mimicking an older style might impair the development of one’s own), he has chosen not to devote a chapter to it, as the topic is large enough for a book of its own. This caught my eye, as I had already seen chapter 6, “Writing for Early Instruments Today,” in the table of contents, expecting it to be just such a chapter. But jumping forward I found instead a detailed discussion of the history of composition for period instruments in contemporary music (Hindemith’s Kammermusik, De Falla’s harpsichord concerto, etc.), in which the mutual influence between the avant-garde and the early music movement is noted with approval. (Schab also points out that for these earlier pieces, the proper “period instrument” would be the one available at the time of composition; a perfect replica of a seventeenth-century harpsichord would thus be inappropriate for the Poulenc concerto.) It is in keeping with the overall tone of the Guide that the practical questions associated with composing for early instruments are assumed to apply to the composition of contemporary music in contemporary style, and the chapter plows ahead with a discussion of spectral analysis and virtual organs (samples of existing historical instruments manipulated via a MIDI interface). It did strike me, however, that by combining this chapter with the previous one (“Historically Informed Arrangement”), the aspiring student could come fairly close to what the intentionally omitted chapter on “period composition” would have been.

3. Improvisation

3.1 Chapter two, “The Musical Text as a Point of Departure,” although explicitly “not a self-contained course in improvisation,” is all about learning improvisation from period treatises, following the example of Diego Ortiz’s Tratado de Glosas (1553). Schab makes a good point regarding Ortiz: although the recercadas in his treatise were intended as examples for improvisation, musicians tend to regard them as self-contained, independent pieces for recording and concert programming. Schab’s longish discussion here regarding period improvisation is not framed as an explicit challenge to this status quo. As with the rest of the book, his tone is more one of optimism and encouragement, but the implication is there: treating Ortiz’s treatise in the manner in which it was designed will create a different type of musical performance than is generally heard in contemporary concerts and recordings. The most well-known recordings are in fact cited by Schab by way of illustration, and Jordi Savall’s 1990 Ortiz recording as compared to his 1970 recording is a particularly striking example in this context (the counterpoint in both is nearly identical).

3.2 The rest of the chapter is devoted to providing a practical guide to creating new recercadas by means of Ortiz’s examples, whether by improvisation or by composition. Maintaining his focus on practice over theory, Schab dissects Ortiz’s recercadas, separating the various melodic figures (subjects) and organizing them according to their relationship to the “harmony”—that is, the motion in the ground bass. By means of generous tables, many of which are multi-page and set in landscape format, he gives comprehensive lists of the possible melodic/harmonic combinations inherent in these subjects, all of which could be applied outside the context of the specific ground basses and recercadas printed in the treatise. As promised, this is a guide for both improvisation and composition, and the pieces created this way would no longer carry the name “Ortiz” as composer. Again, Schab shies away from a confrontational tone here (for example, in discussing how to handle program notes for audiences with certain expectations regarding “early music”), but he correctly notes that early music specialists are already moving in this direction. For example, Lauden Schuett’s recent lute method, although not cited by Schab, contains thirty pieces composed by Schuett himself.^[1] I also distinctly remember classical guitarist Dusan Bogdanovic, who is not considered an “early music” performer, playing Bach suites with significant improvised alterations to the preludes, which, he argued, were in the spirit of the genre. Both cases show a musician moving away from the expectations of the market or venue in the direction of their personal relationship to the musical style, and Schab’s publication suggests that this type of open-minded engagement with early music is becoming central to the early music movement.

4. Patterns of Consumption

4.1 Schab also confronts contemporary patterns of musical consumption, briefly analyzing the pernicious effect of the “Work Concept” (Lydia Goehr’s term^[2]) in its tendency to distance early music works from their earliest sources. Here he includes a perceptive reference to the influence of folk and pop recordings (such as John Renbourn and the Albion band) and streaming services (which automatically populate such fields as “composer” and “title”). His discussion of “Versions and Catalogues,” however, is less clear. Its thrust seems to be a warning against paying attention to secondary scholarship: “The existence of multiple sources does not, in itself, pose a problem.… Problems begin to occur only when musicians are aware of multiple versions and multiple sources” (p. 100). The scholarly catalog of works, according to Schab’s argument, imposes an artificial “top-down” conception of the music work, in which the catalog entry represents an imaginary Work, with the various sources listed below that entry becoming only imperfect instantiations. Schab argues instead for an approach “from the sources up” (p. 100), building one’s edition, performance, and program from there. Here Schab’s straw man tendencies reappear. In warning against the negative consequences of relying on catalog entries, he uses Vivaldi, Purcell, Handel, and Bach as his examples—that is, composers whose works are the most bound to major cataloging efforts: “It would be a miserable state of affairs if we had a single authoritative text for each entry in a composer’s catalogue!” (p. 115). Again, this argument seems as unnecessary as it is simplistic. Like critical editions, catalogs are only a tool, and can surely be used for what they offer (e.g., a time-saver when investigating various sources) without slipping down an imaginary ontological slope.

4.2 Perhaps this divide between scholarship and performance is a relic from an earlier musicology, when it might have been more applicable. But today, statements like “[performers] rarely rebel against facts that have been argued and supported empirically by scholarship” (p. 117) seem a bit old-fashioned; just as early music performers have moved on from the aesthetic stance criticized by Taruskin,^[3] scholars of early music have moved on from the Urtext/Work-concept as articulated by Goehr.

4.3 Schab’s tendency to look back serves him better, however, in the discussion of false relations, which criticizes some nineteenth-century editions of English keyboard music, noting that “only as late as 1964” (p. 122) an edition included such false relations from the sources. While 1964 is hardly a recent edition, Schab makes an important general point, which is that we may become as uncritically accepting of false relations today as earlier editors were intolerant of them. In keeping with his overall optimistic viewpoint, Schab would prefer to label an informed approach to questions that cannot be resolved by objective analysis as “intuition” rather than contingent taste, and he recommends that all source accidentals be retained in performing editions. His example is a good one: Purcell’s Fantazia in D Minor, Z. 743, which has a bewildering array of source inflections whose interpretation is agreed upon by no two modern editions. Better, Schab argues, to investigate each notated instance as a performer, rather than relying on any prior editorial decisions. This is a brave stance, and certainly a defensible one, although I must reflect that even the most open-minded of performers will ultimately have to make decisions on what actual pitches to play, and those decisions will most likely end up notated on the page somehow—that is, just as they are in the modern editions Schab warns us against.

5. Arranging and Composing

5.1 Schab’s chapter on arrangement, fulfilling the promise of the tripartite title, aims to demonstrate “historically sensitive re-setting of works according to historical practices that can be extracted from surviving arrangements” (p. 139). As in the rest of his book, he mainly deals with late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century instrumental music but couches his examples in theoretical discussions that are applicable to early music in a broader sense. As in the other chapters, his practical illustrations include generous musical examples and minute analysis (though the French lute tablature, unfortunately, is reproduced with smallish characters in a modern font, making the “a” and “d” difficult to distinguish). Again, his focus is on encouraging an active, creative engagement with the musical sources.

5.2 As already mentioned, the book closes with a chapter on composing for early instruments, which by its presence as a full chapter rather than a sidebar or footnote, testifies to Schab’s optimism about the early music movement. He even sees the potential ephemerality of contemporary music written for early instruments in a positive light, as it brings such works into a similar cultural space as the early musical works that informed them, which sometimes also existed only for the space of a specific performance.

6. Concluding Remark

6.1 Overall, Schab has managed an impressive achievement: a book that leaves the reader feeling energized, rather than fatigued, by the array of problems and possibilities inherent in the subject matter. Each of his suggestions for the performer is backed up by clear explanations and concrete examples. The implied audience generally seems to be a younger one, probably students who are still formulating their approach to the performance of early music, but Schab’s analyses are insightful enough that professionals may find themselves re-evaluating some of their ideas as well.