The research is primarily addressed to scholars in the burgeoning area of music performance studies and in Webern studies. On the one hand it develops a distinctive approach that combines the use of computational methods with close close reading and cultural analysis. On the other hand it has genetrated comprehensive performance data only partially used in the research, which have been made available for use by future researchers. At the same time the composition in question is an iconic one within twentieth-century piano music, and performers are becoming increasingly conscious of the potential of historical recordings to assist in the development of interpretation and the placing of performance practice within larger historical and critical frameworks.
Creative Economy
Key Findings
Webern's Piano Variations Op. 27 were first performed two years before the outbreak of Second World War, and it was only after the war-and in very different aesthetic and ideological circumstances--that a performance tradition developed. Through a combination of computer-assisted close reading and contextual analysis, the project traced the competing stylistic and ideological directions of early performances-one deriving from the pre-war tradition of the Schoenberg circle, the other from the European avant-garde associated with Darmstadt and die Reihe-and the processes of negotiation through which a more or less consensus interpretation developed by the 1970s.
I set this narrative into a variety of broader cultural and ideological contexts. One is the fraught relationship between the pre- and post-war avant-garde: largely because of Peter Stadlen, who premiered the work, the Piano Variations were constantly in the front line of controversy. I show that the links between pre-war and post-war traditions were much stronger than Stadlen was prepared to admit, for example through the influence of Arnold Schoenberg on Leonard Stein, and of René Leibowitz on Jacques-Louis Monod. Another is the ideological context of the post-war avant-garde, with its aim to make a new beginning and its links to existentialism and structuralism. While for a brief period Webern was seen as emblematic of this new beginning, however, the focus of the Darmstadt avant-garde was on his scores rather than his music as performed or heard.
Key modernist performers of the Piano Variations from Monod and Stein to Paul Jacobs and Yvonne Loriod drew on historical performance practice to a far greater extent than has been generally recognised, and recordings by the so called Darmstadt hardliners-none of whom were German-were also much more distinct and idiosyncratic than the literature suggests. There was a disconnect between Darmstadt-style analysis and performance practice: the evidence of Stein's 1965 DMA thesis is that he, at least, was thinking in pre-war terms even as he made perhaps the most uncompromisingly literalistic of all the recordings of Op. 27. Only in Jean-Rodolphe Kars's recording from 1969, and perhaps those of the Takahashi siblings during the 1970s, is there a suggestion of what an interpretation might have been like that proceeded from the basic tenets of post-war serial aesthetics.
The extent to which post-war performers of Op. 27 perhaps unconsciously drew on the performance practices and assumptions of late nineteenth-century tonality has prompted question as to how far atonal and serial music, like neo-classicism, recirculated the signifiers of earlier music without establishing effective principles of its own. That is what Adorno meant when he said it was necessary to rely on old-school performance practices if Webern's late music was to be given even 'a shadow of meaning'. But Adorno's distinction between meaning and shadow, original and copy, turns on the music-theoretical distinction between 'primary' and 'secondary' parameters that was one of the foundations of post-war music theory, and in the final section of the paper I critique it: the 'rhetorical' aspects of performance do not so much project pre-existing, abstract structures but rather generate structure as experienced by listeners. Thinking about the relationship between scores and performances in this way helps to create space for an appreciation of the creative dimension of performance.
The research was first presented in July 2014 at the Performance Studies Network conference at Cambridge, with other presentations taking place during the year in London, Lisbon, Tallahassee, and Beijing. Two project outcomes have been completed and are forthcoming. One ('Inventing tradition: Webern's Piano Variations in early recordings') is a substantial (24,000 word) article presenting the material decribed above, and is forthcoming in Music Analysis. The other article ('Hearing Gould, seeing music') is a study of physical gesture in performance, structured around two recordings that Gould made for television, in 1964 and 1974; as well as tracing the interaction of the audible and visible dimensions of performance, I set these television performances into the larger context of stylistic development traced by Gould's five recordings of the Piano Variations. The article has been submitted and will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Image in the Fine Arts, ed. Yael Kaduri (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
The project website hosts those audio and video recordings cited in the two outputs that are in the public domain, together with Sonic Visualiser session files that enable readers to integrate bar numbers, tempo and dynamic graphs, and other information into their playback environment. In addition the very substantial corpus of performance data for all three movements that was generated by the project has been placed on the web for use by researchers. Unfortunately copyright restrictions make it impossible to share other project materials, including the remaining recordings and analytical software, on an open basis.