A Revival for Bach Revivalists

Period instrumentalist and early music scholar Geoffrey Burgess breathes new life into an ambitious book project titled The Pathetick Musician, preserved in outlines, rough drafts, and loose notes by the early music specialist Bruce Haynes (1942–2011). Positioning The Pathetick Musician (2016) between contemporary meta-treatises, such as Judith Tarling's Weapons of Rhetoric (2004) and Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Baroque Music Today ([1982] 1988), and historical tutors by Johann Joachim Quantz (1752) and C. P. E. Bach ([1753] 1787), Haynes recorded "his own ideas of what is good musicking, based on a healthy respect for the performing traditions described in [the above] books as well as [his] … experience as a professional performing musician" (xxiv).¹ Haynes's recent death left the manuscript only partially realized, making the (re) construction of The Pathetick Musician by Burgess as much a revival as it is a study for Bach revivalists.

The Pathetick Musician fills two gaps in early music performance studies. It provides a practical method for identifying and employing specific seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetorical devices, as heard in selected recordings of the vocal works of J. S. Bach (as well as other composers). At the same time, it grants readers a tantalizing glimpse of the inner musicality of a compelling early music pioneer—whose intellectual prowess, distinct style, and rebellious attitude embodied the efforts of a once groundbreaking but now mainstream movement. As more early music pioneers like Haynes pass away and the so-called old-school elements of the movement supposedly fade, books such as this one will contribute to a growing reception history of mid- to late twentieth-century "early musicking" rich in firsthand narratives and preserved soundscapes. In this way, The Pathetick Musician, along with Barthold Kuijken's The Notation Is Not the Music, not only stands as a testament to how early music once was—and how it got to be so—but argues at times, and without qualms, how it should have remained.² According to Burgess, early music's acquired mainstream status "has made much possible, but to pioneers like Bruce, the compromises [were] only too apparent" (xiii). In The Pathetick Musician, Haynes attempts to right a ship he saw go off course long ago.

Building on Joshua Rifkin's historical recontextualization of rhetoric as intuitive musicianship rather than a consciously prescribed process, Haynes concurs that rhetoric is "a practical collection of basic techniques of communication, described from the point of view of the performer."³ He believes, however, that "to cultivate rhetorical instincts" we need to absorb "the rules" (xxiv–xxv). Thus, Haynes provides twenty-first-century performers with a historically contextualized set of performative devices or formulas for reviving old music centered on the five offices or stages of rhetoric: Inventio (invention), Dispositio (organization), Elocutio (technique and style), Memoria (memory), and Actio/Pronuntiatio (expression and delivery). Haynes argues that understanding a baroque work as a rhetorical work makes baroque music sound, well, baroque, or more accurately non-Romantic. (And a great deal of ink is spilled in the introduction defining the rhetorical age in opposition to the Romantic one.) "Concerned … that we have lost touch with the spirit of [pre-Romantic] music," Haynes asserts that the awareness and effective delivery of these offices "resurrects the long-lost spirit of baroque musicking" (xxii). And, in the true spirit of Christopher Small's verbing of music, such rhetorical processes apply not only to composers and performers but also to listeners, making The Pathetick Musician an informative and engaging read for all committed early musickers.⁴

But the lion's share of the credit for The Pathetick Musician goes to Burgess, who studied and frequently performed with Haynes, as well as coauthoring a book on the oboe.⁵ Drawing on these experiences, as well as interviews with Haynes's colleagues and students, Burgess constructs a compelling argument, informed and inspired by Haynes, for a rhetorical reading, rendering, and hearing of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. Ultimately, he provides early...