Words on Music: Essays in Honor of Andrew Porter on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday (review)

At a time when musicology is forming an ever-widening network of connections with sister disciplines such as cultural studies and performance theory, it faces a dilemma. How does the twenty-first-century musicologist embrace a rich, yet diverse and often demanding, theoretical apparatus while appealing to a readership that may lack the multidisciplinary exposure demanded by this scholarship. If the range of ideas and methodologies now being embraced represents new territory for the musicologist, the underlying problem is quite familiar. In its historically more insulated form, musicology spent decades developing vocabularies and theoretical models that were as forbidding to fellow academics in other fields as they were to the average music lover. Such gaps are of course endemic to the very formation of an academic discipline: by separating itself off from other disciplines it acquires its own identity, and by developing a scholarly discourse it distinguishes itself from 'mere' amateurism.

Yet there have always been voices ready to resist this kind of separation, offering to bridge these hierarchical gaps and challenge academic solipsism. In the English-speaking world, none have articulated this counter-tradition (if this is not too strong a word) better than Andrew Porter, whose life and work is celebrated in the Festschrift Words on Music: Essays in Honor of Andrew Porter on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday. This impressively diverse volume, which includes not only essays from leading musicologists but musical tributes from Elliott Carter, George Perle, Ned Rorem, and Joseph Kerman, is a fitting measure of the breadth of Porter's impact. Critic, editor, director, poet, and musicologist, Porter defies simple, singular professional classification. His is the sort of broad enthusiasm and sympathy that we might stereotypically associate with the keen dilettante, except that Porter's achievements in each of these fields are those of the devoted specialist. 'Man about this, man about that', writes Joseph Kerman in his introductory appreciation, almost despairing of pinning his subject down adequately (p. xii).

Any student of Verdi's operas will be familiar with Porter's work on Don Carlos, while his opera translations (particularly his Ring for English National Opera) are models of their kind. But it is perhaps his work as a critic (for the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others) that most immediately springs to mind. Here is a critical voice that has somehow managed to bridge the gap between musical public and scholar, between journalism and journals. As several of the contributors to the Festschrift affirm, Porter's writing treats its readers as intelligent without making unreasonable assumptions about their familiarity with the material; he is thorough but not pedantic, unforgiving of low standards but never haughty. Above all, Porter gets to the point and presents his case concisely and persuasively—hardly any wonder that, as Jeremy Noble points out (p. 227), he made such an effective editor.

These qualities were already in evidence early in his career in a review of the first performance of Britten's Billy Budd published in Music & Letters. The article is of course aimed at a more specialized readership than Porter's reviews for, say, the Financial Times, but there is nothing exclusive or stuffy about it. What we get is an informed, logical, and highly readable account of both performance and opera that holds back neither praise nor criticism where the author feels it is due. Porter's analysis of the libretto and its dramatic logic is almost surgical, as when he questions Captain Vere's response to the execution of Billy Budd:

Despite all the insistence on it, the librettists and composer have failed to show that mutiny was any real danger on board H.M.S. Indomitable. 'Oh, what have I done? But he has saved me and blessed me. And the love which passes understanding has...