Listen Again: A New History of Music 9781442237506, 1442237503

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Listen Again

Listen Again A New History of Music David Wulstan

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by David Wulstan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wulstan, David. Listen again : a new history of music / David Wulstan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-3749-0 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4422-3750-6 (ebook) 1. Music--History and criticism. I. Title. ML193.W87 2015 780.9--dc23 2014045106 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Foreword

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

xi

Glossary

ixx

Permissions

xxi

Chapter 1

Some Matters of Terminology and Other Preliminaries

Chapter 2

The Recognition of Key

Chapter 3

Tonal Balance and Minor Tonality: The Use of

1 11

Sequences; Dissonance

23

Chapter 4

The Rule of the Octave: Harmony and Rhythm

39

Chapter 5

The Enhanced Tonic: Fugal Technique and Tonality

53

Chapter 6

Complex Key

77

Chapter 7

The Classical Style (1)

95

Chapter 8

The Classical Style (2)

111

Chapter 9

Classical to Romantic: Beethoven and Schubert

125

Chapter 10

The Romantic Era (1): Chopin, Brahms and Mendelssohn

155

Chapter 11

The Romantic Era (2): The Age of Wagner

181

Chapter 12

The Perception of Music

201

Chapter 13

The Twentieth Century (1): The Palette of Debussy

235

Chapter 14

The Twentieth Century (2): Themes and Theories in the Music of Stravinsky and Others

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

251

The Twentieth Century (3): Techniques and Treatises— Bartók, Hindemith, and others

271

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

297

Contents

vi

Chapter 17

Two Cultures

319

Chapter 18

Mediæval to Renaissance

345

Chapter 19

Renaissance to Baroque

385

Chapter 20

Back to the Future

407

References

427

Index

433

About the Author

457

Foreword In the autumn of 1972, when the Oxford Music Faculty was housed in Holywell, the unfamiliar lecture-room in which I sat was invaded by a corvine whirlwind, gown flapping, eyes gleaming, head cocked to one side. We were thunder-struck by the man’s energy. I still recall every word of David Wulstan’s virtuoso opening cadenza on that occasion, which had to do with How to be a Student. Although I shall never be a martial-arts instructor, and although I have small Latin and less Greek, we do have certain interests in common, and so the intervening forty years have been peppered with meetings – always agreeable, always challenging – in a variety of conferences and studios. David Wulstan’s mode of thought is fascinating, so to read through the work now in your hands was a privilege, and to write a Foreword to it is an honour. The work is presented as an exercise in discovery, almost as a detective story. The author’s admission that he no longer believes some of the things he taught us long ago is no mere amusing sidelight, but an important guarantee of the integrity of thought that results in such surprising yet satisfying conclusions. Wulstan’s Introduction mentions Peter Wishart’s thoroughly ignored book, Harmony (Hutchinson, 1956). That book has become something of a secret talisman amongst thoughtful musicians: it was introduced to me by Wishart’s friend, my revered piano teacher, Alexander Kelly. On its first page we read: “I believe that traditional harmonic theory is completely and demonstrably false. Many of my colleagues in the universities and musical academies share that belief. But it is horrifying that there is no book … which substitutes for these absurd theories a sane view of harmonic practice.” Wishart’s book is long out of print. The ‘absurd theories’ are still promoted. The only difference, thanks partly to electronic keyboards with auto-chord facilities, is that many music students now have no opinion at all, absurd or sane, on how music works. The time is ripe for this book, then. Wulstan’s frame of reference is wider than Wishart’s, his conclusions even more startling. His very extensive knowledge (‘One slight advantage I have is that I’m a butterfly’) and iconoclastic mind make connexions unimaginable to most of us. His book gives us insights beyond our own powers. It’s well worth heeding his frequent injunctions to stop reading and think. His ideas are sometimes difficult to digest, though always presented with perfect clarity. Wulstan’s clarity is important. The people who need to read this book are tomorrow’s musicians. The book is not beyond them. Many of them currently labour through Adorno, through the teenage Burke (as I like to think of him), urgent in the quest for whatever it is that not particularly good musicians have had to say about music. The great Sir John Drummond, Controller of Radio 3, used to say, very frequently, that Music was much too important to be left to

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Musicians; but I can’t help feeling that it may be time for the pendulum to swing back a bit, for musicians to reclaim a musical understanding of their art. This is the place to start. David Owen Norris

Acknowledgements Many of those musicians and scholars who have kindly read and commented upon the following are mentioned in the text. I earnestly thank them (and David Owen Norris – not only for his Foreword, but for his valuable admonitions and corrections). Together with those mentioned below (in no particular order), they are not given the indignities of titles (nowadays apparently awarded to many persons merely for appearing incoherently and ungrammatically on the radio or television): their names redound enough to their honour. David Allen, Philip Wulstan, Laurence Dreyfus, Bruce Philips, Peter Horton, David Mateer, David Hiley, Peter Wright, Matthew Thomson, and several others read drafts and suggested improvements or corrected downright mistakes. Gill Parry has undertaken typing and kindred tasks for me over the years, well beyond the call of duty. Ian Philips-Kerr has furnished the music examples, and again, has often gone considerably beyond any obligations. To these and those mentioned in the text (and to such as, mea culpa maxima, I have stupidly omitted) I render my humble and hearty thanks—the reader may complete the eulogy in suitably Cranmerian language. Without them (and a measure of nagging from some of their number) this book would not have been completed. I should be remiss in not thanking various pupils from the past who, although not mentioned above, have been misinformed by me (as may be seen in this book) but whom, as May Hofman kindly implied, I nevertheless robustly enjoined to think for themselves and ‘inspired a generation of Oxford musicians ’. It is to them and later pupils, who led me to reconsider much of what I had been taught and had erroneously handed on in turn, that I owe the ensuing pages: to them and to my family (especially to Susan, who will not be able to read these pages, alas) that this book should be dedicated. There are others who should be acknowledged: in an earlier stage of preparing this volume, I was made to realise that total inversionism and other hardheld beliefs of the musicologues are tantamount to a religious doctrine. This was unwittingly pointed out to me by the Masters of such vessels as SS Südesudel and of a barque sailing on inland waters, Captain Erica Carnea. The familiar words set by Handel come to mind: ‘Then shall the eyes of the blind be open’d, and the ears of the deaf unstoppèd’. Although the blushes of these commentators are spared by anonymity, their ultimate mentors, the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in London, in stubborn blindness and deafness to Peter Wishart’s criticisms of it, must be vilified by name: that body still persists in using mindless aural tests which condemn its examinees to an acquired artificial misprision in respect of bass progressions. This, with its ‘theory’ and ‘harmony’

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requirements, makes up the risible relics which, in common with those of Piltdown (instantly and devastatingly exposed and ridiculed by H G Wells), should have been long forgotten: to make the poor musical aspirants count backwards in Roman numerals would be a good deal more fruitful. Little wonder, therefore, that Wells’s chilling The Country of the Blind is a reminder that the Country of the Deaf is even more disturbing, since its consequences are visited upon Universities, Colleges of Music and their distressingly impaired pupils. Kant’s injunction that we should Dare to Know (Sapere aude) should be obeyed, but perhaps joined by Audire audite – ‘have the guts to open your ears’ (more or less the title of this book). Finally, however, and sounding a more pleasing note, I should like to render particular thanks due to my editor, Bennett Graff; not only for his Job-like patience in tolerating the tardiness only partly excused by my illness (much, however, due to mere senile inertia), but especially for his taking on this magnum opus which swims so much against the tide of received opinion: I commend his bravery. There is a saying, however, that only dead fish swim with the current. David Wulstan

Introduction Older books on the subject of Musical History were much obsessed with Turning Points during its course. One such Turning Point was in 1600, when the constraints of the modes were overcome and polyphonic composition was banished, allowing Western music to awaken to a new dawn: thus modern tonality, ‘harmony’ as we know it from Bach and other great composers, the question of ‘key relationships’, what we understand about ‘form’ (and much else) newly illumined the path of the art, allowing it to ascend to loftier heights. Some say that the peak was reached in the Romantic period, after which there was something of a slither down the other side of the mountain. Put this way, the proposition is laughable; yet its essence is still found in popular books on music; and some of its underlying assumptions are remarkably persistent. For example, it is often taken for granted that Palestrina was an important figure in the evolution towards the new style of music; but did he really have any effect on the history of tonality and harmony? If he did, then why does some of his music seem to end on the wrong chord, to modern ears? Or, if Palestrina had no influence on the new style of music, where did the idea of keystructure come from? Is it embedded in the psyche, or explicable as a consequence of the action of the laws of acoustic science? This latter explanation is also trotted out as Gospel Truth, though the connexion between mathematics, acoustics and musical logic is usually tenuous. They say that if you know the answer, you haven’t understood the question. This may frequently be true, but more often than not the problem may lie in asking the wrong question, or indeed failing to question received knowledge at all (as with St Augustine’s peacocks, mentioned in a moment). Much musical terminology is imprecise, or even misleading; and many suppositions concerning tonality, harmony and allied subjects are hallowed by usage rather than being informed by fact or logic. What will emerge in later pages of this book may surprise the reader (to be honest, even I was astounded when I began to write them): the simple facts of the early history of tonality turn upon what is almost a series of coincidences; and what appears to be its more complicated later history is in reality a more logical progression. This, though complex on the surface, is revealed to be characterised by a simple process of evolution. So by the end of the book we shall be able to answer the questions posed above, and indeed many more. I would ask one favour from the reader, that of patience. This includes not peeking at the end of the book to see if the Butler was the murderer after all; the bookmark-glossary refers to technical terms, so there should be no need to look at the Index until the

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whole book has been read! Yes, this is something like a detective novel: the author plays fair and does not miss out any clues, although of course they may well be hidden. For the most part, this is not deliberate concealment on the part of the author; it is because the obfuscations of musical literature have often succeeded in burying many of the clues. Unearthing them has been a daunting task, and the process will be equally daunting for the reader to follow. This is not, I fear, a bedtime book: it would be better to read it in easy stages, for there is much that will require a good deal of concentration, even though the topics might seem familiar enough. In mediæval times, the peacock was the symbol of eternal life. Many religious paintings show the bird in a prominent position, to signify survival in the afterlife. This personification of regeneration comes from St Augustine: he believed that the peacock was physically incorruptible; its apparent death was succeeded by resurrection, so it never truly perished. St Augustine was no scientist, but his word on the subject was enough for the mediæval church. It believed that the peacock was incorruptible in the literal sense, just as the church knew that the sun moved round the earth (despite the ancients, and many oriental peoples, having shown the opposite to be true). In the Renaissance, scholars such as Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo became more sceptical about the Church’s pronouncements on scientific matters. Sir Thomas Browne, best known as the author of Religio Medici, decided to test the theory of St Augustine’s peacocks and hung a dead one by his front door. It slowly rotted, its putrefied corpse finally falling prey to maggots. The bird, and indeed the theory, was after all corruptible. But although it might have been the end of St Augustine’s peacocks, there is still Palestrina’s pigeon to be dealt with, and a few assorted canards, dodos and the like, some clothed in the masquerade of scientific theories that turn out to be as far removed from fact as Astrology is from Astrophysics. In 1956, Peter Wishart wrote a book, Harmony, in which he debunked the ‘theory of music’ as it related to harmony, and broke the necks of such peacocks as ‘inversionism’ and the ‘rules of harmony’ which were ignored by composers themselves on the grounds that ‘they were allowed to break the rules’. Challenging though this book was, virtually all of our teachers of music have studiedly ignored that challenge. One of the reasons for the book falling upon stony ground was that Wishart was preaching to the converted on the one hand but, principally, to the deaf on the other. Moreover, most of the readers of Peter Wishart’s book (and had heard or read his RMA lecture) had already learnt the sort of thing that he demonstrated to be wrong, so its message was something of a belated instruction to shut the stable door.

Introduction

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What was needed was an elementary harmony book, so that the pupil could begin on the right lines rather than discovering the truth too late. Peter was unwilling to write such a book; so was I, once a pupil of his. We both believed that using the music of real composers was a better vehicle of instruction than a textbook. Not all teachers can be as good as he was, however, and my own experiences of other people’s teaching, mentioned below, led me to change my mind about the need for a harmony textbook. Thus, many years later, I began to write one, entitled Musical Language: The Grammar of Harmony (henceforward referred to simply as Harmony), which I and colleagues elsewhere used in order to make the teaching of the subject more realistic, and to reflect the real practice of composers. In attempting to write a second part to this book, however, like Topsy, it growed: the result was a rather different treatment of the subject. What follows volume was therefore an intended companion to Harmony, also having the general title Musical Language; but subtitled The Syntax of Tonality. I soon realised that these phrases would have given the book a musty ‘academic’ air (which I hope is unjustified); so a ‘snappier’ title was decided upon, in order to dispel this notion, despite the treatment being far from superficial and, at times, requiring a good deal of perseverance by the reader. As I discussed in Harmony, there is really no such thing as a singular musical language, for there are as many languages as there are styles. So some such title as The Language of Music would in any case be unsatisfactory, even had Deryck Cooke’s book not already been written. As will become clear in the following pages, the supposition of a singular musical language is one of many ways in which I disagree with Cooke’s thesis. Nevertheless, although this pair of books might more accurately be called The Languages of Music, when it comes to the question of tonality it would be slightly more excusable to use the word ‘language’ in the singular. Tonality generally evolved in a way which was less dependent on the style of individual composers, but affected the development of European music as a whole. There are, of course, many tonal features that are particular to one composer, but it is reasonable to speak of a general progression in the history of tonality, though it is impossible to speak in the same way of individual harmonic styles. It may be argued that tonality is not the only syntactic feature of music. This is true, for rhythm is clearly important, not only of itself, but is often interlocked with the matter of tonality, as will be shortly be seen; but tonal logic is probably the most important such feature in European music for the last few hundred years. It is also arguable that some features are almost simultaneously grammatical and syntactic in nature; again, this is true; but although it may be difficult to draw a fine line between grammar and syntax, it does not much mat-

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ter, as already outlined in Harmony. The many facets of tonality are sufficient in themselves to merit a single-minded treatment. As already mentioned, I had never believed in the idea of a harmony book, a belief much strengthened by my teaching of the subject at Oxford which involved the frustrating task of attempting to undo the damage caused by such textbooks (and I myself was still teaching things about tonality that I had learnt, but which I now know to have been entirely mistaken). Ultimately, however, the only solution seemed to be in providing an alternative. In so doing, the aim was to have been simple: to provide a book which was based on aural and keyboard skills and which dealt only with composers’ real styles, separately considered and studied from real music. Thus, Harmony was begun in 1978. The first few chapters were relatively easy to write; but it soon became apparent that many more preconceived notions (quite apart from ‘inversionism’, ‘common practice’ and that it was a crime to do harmony at the keyboard) stood in the way of getting to grips with the harmonic practice of the composers themselves. One of these notions concerned the nature of tonality. As my colleagues and students helped to devise and use the book with me, first at Cork, and then at Aberystwyth, we discovered that many long-accepted doctrines could not be reconciled with a closer look at the music itself and were in need of drastic revision. So, having to approach the study of tonality anew (and other topics such as dissonance, also widely misunderstood) the book was constantly revised as we tried to get nearer to the truth. So it took far longer to write than had initially been envisaged. Meanwhile, the book also became more voluminous, as already noted. A major cause of its increasing size was this very subject: tonality and its ramifications. The historical consideration of tonality, together with its technical aspects, seemed to call for a separate book. Several writers have commented on the lack of a history of tonality. There is certainly a need for such a work, especially since many analytical methods seem to be based on a view of tonality that is shaky on logical grounds and of little use when applied to any music which belongs outside a narrow historical period. What follows is an attempt to cover most of the ground in regard to European music from the earliest times of which we have any real knowledge and to determine the mechanisms of tonality from a historical point of view; but it is not an exhaustive treatment of the topic, which must await a more energetic author. Some shortcomings will be readily evident here: I have not attempted to determine who might have been the first composer to use such and such an idiom; and only rarely have I considered the views of past theorists (other than those, say, of Rameau and Schenker, who have had a pervasive influence), for this is a book about music rather than a book about books. Also, I am aware that there are

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many unfilled gaps in my treatment of the subject: apart from other considerations, some interesting discussions have had to be taken out of the book in order to prune it to a reasonable size. Although this book will show how much our feeling for tonality is bound up with harmony, I hope it will eventually demonstrate that tonality can also exist in purely melodic music. I hope also that this volume will go some way towards dispelling the notion that the quintessence of music is to be associated with an Arcadian two hundred or so years when it had emerged from a kind of primæval tonal sludge called ‘modality’, after which came decay, including the ‘breakdown of tonality’, the demise of ‘functional harmony’, and many other disasters. As some readers will be aware, I have never believed in the commonly-held notion of ‘modality’; and ‘tonal’, the supposed opposite to ‘modal’, is also a difficult word, especially when contrasted with ‘atonal’. The problem of nomenclature is easily solved by using the term ‘duotonal’, a word whose inventor I cannot recall: this means ‘tonal’ in the sense that Baroque suites, Classical sonatas and Romantic symphonies are tonal; the term ‘diatonal’ (which I believe is mine) can be applied to other tonalities, including the genuinely ‘modal’ plainchant, that do not fall within the same system. Since diatonality came both before and after duotonality, it seems that the evolution of Western tonality took place not in a straight line, but in a more circuitous fashion. A less obvious finding of this book will be that there is nothing self-evident, or acoustically predetermined, about the system of so-called ‘functional harmony’ (a term which is difficult to take seriously, for ‘non-functional harmony’, in common with a non-functional motor car, presumably doesn’t work). Whatever it might be called, the harmonic system as we know it began to evolve much earlier than is generally imagined, came to fruition rather later than is usually thought, and continued to evolve in ways which have not properly been traced hitherto. Other readers, knowing of my interest in ‘Early’ (and indeed the earliest) music, might be surprised to know that my first enthusiasms were for twentiethcentury music: it was the influence of George Miles and Harold Watkins Shaw that led to my becoming fascinated with the problems of Baroque and Renaissance performance. One aspect of musical scholarship which I have always disliked, however, is analysis; I realise now that my unconscious reasons for this dislike were that most methods of analysis start from the printed page, which can be deceptive, either mildly, or in a thoroughgoing fashion. Another apology to the reader therefore concerns various tedious pages of analysis which follow and which apparently concern the necessary evil of music as printed: but, as touched upon in the next paragraph, the use of well-known works will, I hope, allow the remembered sound to be our main concern, the bar-numbers and so

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forth being merely the equivalent of map-references which remind the aural traveller of various places of interest upon the journey. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus (“I know what I like and I like what I know”) is now in his motorcar, looking at his Satnav, and too busy to listen to any mildly taxing music. This book is therefore addressed to a more restricted public, not only Chesterton’s “… the human race, to which so many of my readers belong”, but that minority which either goes to concerts or gives them (and it will be seen that several important matters of performance and interpretation emerge from the discussion). There is also an inherent problem caused by a technical paradox: my thesis is that music should be heard, not studied from the written page; but in order to discuss the way we hear it, theoretical jargon is unavoidable, even though it leads us contradictorily to the page (which, as we shall again discover, can be wrong, even if it apparently stems from the composer himself). In the same story by G K Chesterton, he tells us about “the darkest of the Books of Life” wherein there is a law that “If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the thousandth time you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.” So I make no apology for bringing well-known music back once more for that time when it might truly reveal itself to the ear. Nevertheless, I would like to ask for forgiveness if I have stated the obvious rather often, or instructed my fellow musicians in matters about which they probably know more than me. On the other hand no quarter will be given to those who fail to hear Mozart’s Musical Joke for what it is, thus illustrating the story of the Ass and the Lyre, nor to those who cannot recognise Purcell’s genius contrasted with Pachelbel’s lack of it (nor indeed that Bach is quite capable of more than one Homeric nod). The history of tonality is not the same thing as the history of harmony, but the two topics necessarily run with each other, at least in regard to later music; so it is important to be clear on matters of harmonic terminology. As the following chapters were originally a continuation of the harmony textbook, some of its assumptions, vocabulary and analytical methods need to be summarised before going further. The rationale behind them is more easily demonstrated in the context of the aims and methods of that book, but the first chapter which follows is mainly for the benefit of the new reader. It is lengthier than might at first seem necessary, not least because the burden of theory, which has increasingly weighed down the study of harmony in the last hundred years or so, is not easily shrugged off in a few lines. Harmony (privately published) was used in Aberystwyth and in a few other universities; those who have read it might think of skipping the following chapter, but some matters are expressed differently in this book; this is also true of material in later chapters, previously differently covered in Harmony. The patience for which I asked earlier extends to a request that the

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reader should not assume that definitions of simple things are much the same as the accepted ones: some changes of terminology, very often appearing at first to be slight, will later be seen to have far-reaching consequences. Few of the works instanced in the course of this book are obscure; indeed, as already hinted, most of the discussion deliberately refers to well-known pieces, for example the Chopin Preludes or the ‘48’. I have reluctantly used the latter shorthand, for ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ is neither English nor German, antique nor modern, and in any event the original title properly refers only to ‘Book I’. So, faute de mieux, the notation 48, I, or 48, II, is used. These works, together with Handel’s Messiah, his Solo Sonatas (the so-called Opus 1) and Suites are referred to in early chapters, and it would be handy to have various other works available in later parts of the book: these are signalled in the appropriate places. Otherwise, most examples and discussions should be more or less self-explanatory. The last section of this Introduction is a repeated warning that many of the following chapters are not bedtime reading. It is easy to describe an apple falling from a tree, but difficult to explain g and Newtonian mechanics; the shape and beauty of a rainbow are obvious, but the physics which determine its shape and make-up are much more challenging. The evolution of tonality, especially when looking back from the end of this book, will, I hope, appear mostly to be of elegant simplicity: on the other hand, the charting of it will be something of an onerous task for the reader. I recommend that some chapters (notably 3–6) be read slowly, at least twice, and often passing over analyses and so forth at the first reading, so that the general argument may be absorbed. Although I might reasonably apologise for the essential complexity of this argument, I cannot do so for the muddle into which theoreticians of almost all eras, necessarily debunked here, have brought the study of tonality, nor for the somewhat convoluted course of musical history itself. So, if the reader finds some of what follows akin to the experience of swimming against the tide, my sympathy is tempered by my having likewise to have swum thus. The writing of this book has involved the painful process, for something like a quarter of a century, of my having to unlearn what I had imbibed from books and various teachers (some facets requiring more like half a century); then following the more fruitful method of looking (or rather listening) for the truth by returning to the proper study of musical language(s): the music itself. Following this Introduction is a Glossary of technical terms which are employed in the first part of the book. As has been mentioned, it is desirable that the reader should not peek at the end of the book; to this end, therefore, it would be advantageous either to mark those pages with a bookmark or, alternatively (and perhaps better), to photocopy the Glossary. By such means it will be unnecessary

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to consult the index and therefore to find out prematurely about the Butler and his doings.

Glossary Registering the first appearance and definition of each term; see also summaries at chapter ends