ornamentation in baroque and post-baroque music. with special emphasis on j. s. bachby frederick...

Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music. With Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach byFrederick NeumannReview by: David FullerJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 1980), pp. 394-402Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831119 .

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394 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

vocative ideas and speculations along the way. But there is no doubt, it seems to me, that Kastner passed up the opportunity to write the defini- tive biography of Cabez6n. He should have asked a trusted, objec- tive friend to edit out the supposi- tions and purple prose; a slimmer, but more substantial, book would have been the result.

CHARLES JACOBS City University of New York

Frederick Neumann. Ornamenta- tion in Baroque and Post-Baroque Mu- sic. With Special Emphasis on J. S. Bach. Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1978. xiv, 630 pp.

BAROQUE MUSIC touches the lives of a very great many people; if misconceptions about its performance mar their experience of this superb art, then a very great wrong is being done. Frederick Neumann has per- ceived such a wrong, and beginning in 1964, in a series of publications of which this gigantic book sums up only one phase, he has set about to un- do it. The misconceptions as he sees them are by no means a matter of errors accumulated over the hundred years, more or less, during which historical performing practices have been studied. They are false doctrine, as he insists again and again: doctrine which has no base in historical fact, which shackles the per- former and distorts the music.

The teachings at issue are highly specific and few in number; those ad- dressed in this book are the rules that trills shall begin on the beat with the upper auxiliary and that appoggiaturas, slides, turns, mordents and ar-

peggios are to be played on, not before the beat. Error may be corrected but doctrine must be extir- pated. It is not sufficient to point out the truth for musicians to turn from the path to which they have become accustomed; an equal and opposite force must be applied--opposite to the false doctrine and equal to the weight of countless writings dating back to Arnold Dolmetsch's pioneer- ing work in the early years of the century.

From the start, the figure of J. S. Bach has lain at the focus of the author's concerns; and as the title dem- onstrates, that is the case here also. But direct evidence of the finer details of Bach's own performing practice is sparse by contrast with the daunting mass of information about certain aspects of the practice of some other baroque composers; indeed, considered in relation to the place Bach holds in the standard repertory, it is virtually non-existent. Thus Neumann, like all other writers who have dealt seriously with Bach, has been compelled to glean the surrounding fields and argue the relevance of the gleanings. This he has done with an industry which is scarcely imaginable, a brilliant organizing talent, extraordi- nary care in execution, and a forensic skill seldom seen among musi- cologists. Nor has he been content to gather up only what can be made to bear on Bach; once in a field, he sur- veys it all, and though he may pass over one region altogether if he feels it is remote from his interest (see be- low for the case of England), the rest are subjected to a meticulous re-ex- amination.

The author's central purpose, the correction of certain specific ideas about performance as they apply to Bach, and his method, the bending



REVIEWS 395

to this purpose of the largest possible quantity of evidence, do not altogether fit with the implication con- veyed by the book's title and bulk. The allotment of space is not that of a comprehensive survey, even one "with emphasis." Not only are the overwhelming majority of the central four hundred pages devoted to alternatives to the disputed doctrine, but twenty percent of the main text (about ii5 out of 573 pages) deals with Bach alone. The result is a radi- cally unbalanced treatment of ornamentation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--an imbalance, freely acknowledged by the author, that affects both the treatment of in- dividual ornaments and the attention paid to larger facets of the subject.

A breakdown of the slightly more than 150 pages devoted to single- note ornaments will illustrate this imbalance and at the same time show something of the way the book is or- ganized. After a short introduction in which Vorschlag, Nachschlag, Zwisch- enschlag, and Zusammenschlag are explained (alas for the poverty of our English vocabulary!) come twenty- six pages on the seventeenth-century French port-de-voix and couli with no fewer than ninety-five musical examples (throughout this review I have counted each example separately, whether separately numbered or grouped with others over a single number, since even in one group the examples often come from different sources). Of these examples, which include music for voice, viol, flute, lute, organ, and harpsichord, eighty- three illustrate what the author calls "prebeat" execution, that is, ornaments that take their value from the preceding note, even if attached by slur, sign or proximity to the following one.

This section is followed by four

and a half pages on Fran.ois

Cou- perin in which it is explained that Couperin's sweeping advocacy of "on-beat" execution (the value of the ornament taken from the following note) "points to a substantive role in France of anticipated [prebeat] Vorschldge before, during, and after" the composer's time, and that the rule, moreover, "was not to be taken on face value" even in his own works (pp. 76 and 78; author's italics). Twelve more pages are devoted to the same graces as used by other composers in France from 1715 to 1775; all the discussions are directed toward prebeat execution as possible or preferred.

A paucity of sources confines the treatment of Italian one-note graces between 1590 and 1710 to six pages and thirty examples-of which twenty-three are said to be of the prebeat variety. In the twenty-one pages assigned to Germany from 1620 to 1715, several of the examples contain a mixture of prebeat and on- beat graces making counting difficult; of fifty-six unmixed examples, forty-nine

illustrate--or are meant to

illustrate--prebeat execution. Bach receives forty pages and 146

musical examples in keeping with his place in the author's design. Here, however, the approach is quite different. Whereas the vast majority of the earlier illustrations were of ornaments written out and therefore un- equivocal in execution, if not in significance, most of the Bach examples are of ornaments indicated by sign, by small notes, or not at all, and their execution must be argued. In the case of Bach, moreover, the author must deal not only with the problem of the composer's own little ornament table (in the W. F. Bach Clavierbiichlein) where the only appoggiaturas are the long, on-beat




kind, but also with the even longer appoggiatura, occupying from a half to all of the main note, described by Emanuel Bach and Quantz and often applied retroactively in modern writings to Sebastian Bach. In effect, the massive accumulation of written prebeat examples is now to carry out its duty of providing precedent and un- derpinning for the author's central task of uprooting the on-beat doctrine as it applies to Bach.

Twenty-six pages and over one hundred examples are devoted to this task--eighty-four examples in which prebeat execution is argued, nineteen which may come on the beat but must be shorter than the doctrine would ordinarily hold. Then the delicate matter of the true (i.e., on-beat) appoggiatura is con- fronted-delicate because of the risk of destroying plausibility along with hegemony. A reader with the sound of the final chord of the Saint Mat- thew Passion in his ears will need to be reassured that not all such splendid clashes are banished: "Examples [of a certain type of on-beat vocal appoggiatura] abound everywhere and only a few illustrations need to be given" (p. i54). (The implication that the opposite case may hold for the prebeat graces which have been so copiously illustrated in the preceding section is not discussed.) A cautious eight pages and about twenty examples are offered for the offending grace. The section closes with a short discussion of the appoggiatura in recitative where for the first time one feels that the evidence is being explored to enlighten rather than to persuade.

But the subject of one-note graces does not rest here; thirty-five pages and another 135 examples or so on Italy and Germany from I710 to 1765 remain. This, of course, is the

period of the great treatises: Heini- chen, Mattheson, Tartini, Gemini- ani, Emanuel Bach, Marpurg, Quantz, Tosi-Agricola, Leopold Mozart, and others-the sources which are most often quoted by framers of the doctrine and which are directed toward musical styles more advanced than Sebastian Bach's. Here, prebeat advocacy necessarily staggers a bit; only about two-thirds of the musical examples are in favor, and a good many of these are, like the ones for Bach, a matter of the "best" solution in a doubtful situa- tion. Here and there a citation tee- ters on a triple negative: Mattheson's "failure to mention the prebeat style explicitly within his cursory discussion permits no inference of non- use" (p. 181). As if to encourage an- ticipation in this hostile environ- ment, the author administers fre- quent pats of approval: ". . . has to be played before the beat . . . makes ex- cellent musical sense." Quantz's thirteenth and fourteenth chapters are a "treasure trove for anticipated Vorschliige" (p. 191).

Eventually the arch-villain of the down-beat doctrine is identified as C.P.E. Bach, "the arbitrary lawmak- er." But even he could not chase prebeat and interbeat graces from the eighteenth century. Rooted in an "ir- repressible natural impulse" they were "immune to the ban which Philipp Emanuel had hurled against them" (p. i99). Here, finally, the tone matches the extreme slanting of evidence and argument in the preceding i50 pages. That the reader is reminded from time to time of the way the cards are stacked is scant balm to his irritation at being per- sistently manipulated: "It might be added that the disparity between the relatively small space allotted to the discussion of the appoggiatura as



REVIEWS 397 contrasted with the grace-note style must not be understood as a reflection of their respective importance; it is simply a reflection of their respective controversialism" (p. 173). The fact remains that it is up to the reader to do his own research if he wants to learn how appoggiaturas are handled or to form an idea of their incidence.

But there is another fact that remains, and it is that an unprecedent- ed horde of nearly five hundred examples of single-note ornaments have been ferreted out from obscure treatises and from the original sources of every kind of baroque and pre-classical music, painstakingly transcribed, and presented to the reader with full information about their provenance. Whether or not one agrees with the interpretations placed upon them-and with many, any sensible musician will certainly agree-the fanatically minute analy- sis of details is always stimulating and constitutes the kind of challenge that drives research ahead. The fact that the examples have been chosen and the arguments constructed so as to overwhelm the reader with the correctness of the author's views rather than place before him a bal- anced sampling of the historical pos- sibilities does not detract from the incalculable value of the examples themselves.

Perhaps this is the place to com- ment on the accuracy of the tran- scriptions in the book as a whole. Although I was able to check only about 14o against the original sources, hardly more than a third (fifty-one) contained errors, and most of these were a matter of a mis- placed slur, an omitted time signa- ture, a note or two left out, one beam too few, and so forth. Only rarely did they affect the argument, and indeed in the case of sources existing in

several copies some may have been variant readings. In one case an example with a gratuitous half-note (27.6.c, from Dalla Casa) appears a second time corrected (47.1.b). In the case of some tremoletti from Herbst (28.4.c and 37-3), the figures are inverted on both appearances. In many cases obvious mistakes are tac- itly corrected, and in many of the seventeenth-century French vocal examples solmization syllables are left out-a pity, since they spell out the composer's understanding of which notes are essential and which ornamental. An example from Con- forto (27.4) is "corrected" with an ex- tra note and some added 3's on the unlikely assumption that triplets are indicated--and then a beam is left out of the second part of the example.

Controversy about trills generally focuses on the question of whether the ornament is to begin on the written note or the one above-in either case, on the beat. To these alternatives the author has added others which he calls "grace-note" trills: trills beginning with the upper auxiliary sounded before the beat (something one hears daily from string players), trills which entirely antici- pate the beat, and "straddling" trills (i.e., beginning before and ending after the beat). He calls the trill of false doctrine "appoggiatura trill," thus evoking Berlin, Marpurg (who de- fined the trill as a series of appoggiaturas), harmonic function, and the galant style, and drawing attention away from the coloristic and dynam- ic vitality that made it so beloved of Couperin and the legion of theorists and composers (including Bach) who gave it as the normal or only form of trill in their ornament tables.

Underlying the initial classifica- tion (into no fewer than eighteen




sub-types) and running through much of the subsequent discussion is the assumption that the repercus- sions of the trill are heard metrically; the trill is said to be "anchored" to the note which repeatedly falls on strong subdivisions of the beat. The advantages that this assumption lends to the arguments in favor of grace-note and main-note trills, which fill most of the next 142 pages, are considerable. For example, a "supported" main-note trill is shown thus:

and we are cautioned that the upper- note anchor of the trill proper does not produce an appoggiatura effect because it does not come on the initial downbeat (p. 242). But a "supported appoggiatura" trill

"is in fact a long appoggiatura whose resolution is ornamented by the trill proper," that being, of course, a main-note trill. This kind of heads-I- win-tails-you-lose reasoning enables the author to cite a toccata by Frescobaldi with five trills of the first type and twelve of the second in sup- port of a statement that "the vast majority [of Frescobaldi's trills] start with the main note" (p. 291, Ex. 27. io.b). Apparently the "supported appoggiatura" trill does not exist, or is not a trill.

There are so many genuine examples of main-note trills that there was no need to add false ones, such as Ex. 26. i6.a, from Brijon (1780). By halting the example short of Brijon's third measure, the author allows it to be read as a "main-note supported trill with upper note anchor." But the next measure with its repeated

upper auxiliary (see Ex. i) shows that Brijon was thinking of a normal trill after all, and this is confirmed by the symbolic notation of the same pattern as it is transposed up the suc- cessive degrees of the scale. (The original is evidently a kind of finger exercise.)

The insistence on a functional role for the first note of the trill leads to many arguments from voice-leading, all of which necessarily favor main- note or grace-note starts: since composers rarely write parallel fifths and octaves in full-sized notes if they can help it, the main note is usually safe, whereas a written or unwritten auxiliary in its place may well produce them. Cases there certainly are where ornaments produce ugly par- allels, though not everyone would agree which ones are bad enough to avoid; but it is in the very essence of ornaments that they lie a little out- side the canon of strict part writing, and this is especially true of rapid trills where the effect is of a composite shimmer of uncertain pitch, not of two big notes slogging it out in alter- nation. In one instance, the author's horror parallelorum yields to amor an- ticipationis--though here again the reader is spared knowledge of the fact by omission of the offending bit, in this case the accompaniment. The example (Ex. 2) is "a model of a ca- dential trill which has an obviously anticipated turn before its main-note start" (p. 384, Ex. 31.41.a).

The section on trills is comparable in its wealth of examples to that on single graces and as tireless in its insistence on alternatives to the Doc- trine. Even discounting the many forced and slanted arguments, the number of situations where main- note trills seem to be an authentic and desirable solution is impressive. But although it is impossible to argue



REVIEWS 399

Example I C.R.Brijon, L'apollon moderne, Op.2 (Lyons, I78O), p.50

Cadences pleines

I - A - w _

_ _ _ _ _ _ ___ ~ e

Example 2

Jean-Paul-Rgide Martini [Schwartzendorf?], Milopee moderne (Paris, [c. 179I])

Largo

[fifths]

cadence harmonique

CN., 6....,F.4,

the point without reviewing fifty or one hundred examples and their interpretations, I shall simply say that I find none of the arguments for the "grace-note" trill convincing; in every case, it seems to me, there is another explanation or a better solution.

A separate section of twenty pages or so deals with trills combined with slides, turns, and mordents. In all, well over half the main text is devoted to single-note ornaments and trills, these being the two classes most in need of reform. Slides, turns, and mordents by themselves take up nearly one hundred more pages. Here, although no opportunity is lost to advocate placing these ornaments before the beat, the treat-

ment is far less polemical, the arguments less insistently slanted. And as always, the examples are of inex- haustible interest.

The arpeggio completes the list of ornaments which false doctrine would have us begin on the beat. Here, as everywhere in the author's writings, the argument is pervaded by a certain literal-mindedness that rejects illusion, takes a cognitive rather than a sensory approach to musical questions, is able to extrapo- late a whole structure of rational argument from the printed model of a trill while ignoring its real sound in performance, is uncomfortable with ornaments that displace or replace principal notes-that seeks, indeed, to protect Bach's scores against the




disfigurements of inequality and overdotting. "Does it not stand to reason," he asks in triply negative connection with the arpeggiation of the opening chord of the second movement of Bach's G-major harpsichord partita, "that we should not sacrifice the essential to the unimpor- tant?" (p. 493). Is it not reasonable, in other words, that the melody note should come on the downbeat rather than wait for the end of a rising arpeggio? It is indeed reasonable, but this is an allemande, not a syllogism. The imaginative ear, understanding perfectly where the melody note is supposed to come, is grateful not to have the initial upbeat cluttered with anticipated material from the chord which follows.

The remaining topics are the vi- brato, the acciaccatura, and free ornamentation. One might expect that the first would be encouraged and the last two decried, but in fact, with these fifty pages or so the reader emerges into a sunny world of even- handed discussion where curiosity replaces reforming zeal, where un- certainty is allowed to exist and judgment to be suspended, where one dares drop one's guard and take pleasure in the author's enormous knowledge of the field. Here Fred- erick Neumann is at peace with his colleagues, so there is no need to pile up crushing masses of evidence. Of course, free ornamentation-im- provised divisions, cadenzas, passag- gi, variations-is the most complex and perhaps the most ubiquitous kind in the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it receives only two-thirds the space allotted to such a minor ornament as the slide. Yet it is not without reason that the decision has been taken to let other studies of the subject, notably those by Ferand, carry the burden.

There is really no way to deal with it except to give a large number of ex- tended samples, and this could easily have doubled the book's size. It is fu- tile to suggest that one could have done with two hundred fewer prebeat and main-note pages; without these the book would probably never have existed.

There is, however, one lacuna that should not have been allowed to stand, the more so because it encour- ages the reader to acquiesce in the author's highly arguable contention that the pre-Bach German performing tradition was largely Italian. "The whole body of English ornamentation was left out because it has no traceable bearing on Bach" (p. vii). It is true that so little is known about the execution of English ornaments that one cannot be sure which features of the German practice one should try to trace to English ori- gins. But the English contribution to German music in the early seventeenth century was nevertheless im- mense. It came directly through Englishmen such as Brade who were decisive in the development of Ger- man ensemble music; and, probably more importantly for the history of ornamentation, it came indirectly through Sweelinck-who was sepa- rated from Bach only by Scheide- mann and Reincken. (Neither Sweelinck nor his pupils Scheidt and Scheidemann figure in the index.)

There is also what seems to me to be a fundamental misapprehension concerning the operation of French influence in Germany. To maintain that France burst upon Bach only with the Celle experience (p. 41) is to overlook large segments of German musical culture in the second half of the seventeenth century. What Bach inherited in matters of performance as well as style was already a syn-



REVIEWS 401

thesis of English, French, Italian, and native elements. From Besard and Praetorius on, large quantities of French dance music were natural- ized on German soil. Household tab- latures are full of it. Upon what model is Froberger supposed to have formed his suites but that of French lute music? Some of the most impor- tant sources of that repertory are German. The amount of French harpsichord ornamentation in Ger- man sources is difficult to ascertain, partly because of the use of tablature and partly because of the unsettled state of ornament notation in the earlier original French sources.1 The German signs themselves suggest an English inheritance. In any case, the synthesis of styles had proceeded far enough by the time of Bach's child- hood that the modern editor of Bux- tehude's harpsichord works was not aware that he had included two suites by Nicolas Lebegue, and Frie- drich Blume could state that these pieces "exhibit no special con- nections with any composer but Fro- berger" (MGG, II, col. 568). Not only were many of Lebbgue's ornaments transcribed into the tablature (using partially English signs) but other, presumably original pieces were ornamented similarly. Kuh- nau's suites are generously supplied with ornaments; Ex. i5.29 (p. 2o0) has a perfect forest of them (recom- mended to be played before the beat, needless to say).

The book is a splendid physical object, bigger than a volume of MGG and worlds more legible, hand-

somely printed with unheard-of margins, and worthy of a place in the luxurious company of Rokseth's Polyphonies du Xlllidme sikcle and Bticken's Handbuch der Musik- wissenschaft. Every conceivable re- source of layout and apparatus has been employed to make it easy to use. Every pair of pages carries the numbers and titles of parts and chapters. Footnotes are where they be- long and are printed in double columns to set them apart from the smaller of the two type faces used in the text. Index entries are analyzed, so that one does not have to search through a long series of anonymous page numbers. There is a glossary of ornament signs and terms with principal source references for each en- try, allowing one to work through the index to the place in the text where each is discussed. There is also a "selected bibliography," whose selective rigor has, however, ex- cluded writings it ought to have re- tained, notably those of Michael Collins, who has disputed many of the author's views in former articles. One might add to it a little-known table of no fewer than seventy-eight entries, of which sixteen are musical explications and many carry verbal ex- planations as well: [Toinon], Reciieil de trio nouveaux . . . (Paris, 1699), F:PnVm7 III2: to be published in the April, 1980 issue of Early Music.

The author has created a work in- dispensable in its field, and I am con- vinced that as its riches filter into our thinking, fundamental changes will take place in our approaches to baroque ornamentation. How ironic that at the same time he should have conferred indispensability upon all the works of the Doningtons and the Collinses. By so slanting his treatment of controversial issues, he has insured that a realistic understanding

1 For extensive information about French lute and harpsichord music on German soil, see Wallace Rave, "Some Manuscripts of French Lute Music, 1630-1700oo" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1972), and Bruce Gus- tafson, French Harpsichord Music of the Seven- teenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979).




of them can be achieved only with full weight being given to the very arguments he has set out to refute.

DAVID FULLER State University of New York

at Buffalo

David Brown. Tchaikovsky: The

Early Years 84 o- 874. New York: W. W. Norton & Compa- ny, Inc., 1978- 348 pp.; io illustrations, 95 examples.

DAVID BROWN'S projected three-volume study of Tchaikovsky promises to be a conscientious but convention- al life-and-works biography, if this first volume can be taken as repre- sentative of his approach. He has re- lied entirely on familiar, published materials, including the composer's collected works (Moscow, 1940- 71), his diaries, correspondence and critical writings, memoirs by his friends, and, in particular, Modest Tchaikovsky's three-volume biography of his brother, Zhizn' Petra Il'icha Chaikovskago (Moscow, 1900-2). The latter remains a standard work, de- spite the author's suppression of information he thought damaging to Tchaikovsky's memory. An English- language edition, translated and con- densed by Rosa Newmarch, ap- peared in one volume as The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (Lon- don, 1906 [1905]).

Although Modest's judgment has been questioned, his authority (even as diluted in Newmarch's abridg- ment) has never been seriously chal- lenged. Surely after three-quarters of a century it is time for a challenge. Not that Modest's work could ever be discarded. However flawed by fa- milial devotion, it stands a per-

manent monument. But the canons of historical criticism and methodol- ogy have been rewritten since Mo- dest finished his capital labor.

In his preface, Mr. Brown dis- abuses his readers of any expectation that he might be a proponent of the "new" biography: "I have not at- tempted any deep elucidation of [Tchaikovsky's] personality, for I am not a medical psychologist, nor do I wish to add to the quantity of half- baked commentary and even mis- chievous rubbish masquerading as penetrating psychological insight that has been written on some other composers in recent years" (p. 12). Instead, he aims "to draw as rounded a portrait of the man as is possible" by recounting in chronicle fashion the surviving documentary evidence. But what a disappointment when he offers nothing really new in the way of documentary evidence, yet dis- qualifies himself from a "deep elucidation" of the parade of information he presents. Documents alone rarely reveal the whole man. In any case, there remains something inevitably arbitrary about which documents survive, finally to be filtered through a biographer's judgment. Brown must have scrutinized the significant factual residue about Tchaikovsky more rigorously than the rest of us; thus he, more than anyone else, should have been in a position to ob- serve characteristic, perhaps repeated patterns in the composer's life. A biographer need not be a medical psychologist to share these observa- tions or risk their interpretation. Would they be less valid than those of the composer's colleagues who ob- served his public face day after day at the Moscow Conservatory? Can- not thoughtful speculation grounded in factual authenticity approach truth as closely as a recital of fortui-

