The Creative Process in Music from Mozart to Kurtag

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. The source was the Engelmann Sketchbook from 1823, which is now held in the collection of the Beethoven-Haus at Bonn.Brahms wrote to Wilhelm Engelmann about the manuscript on 23 February 1897. In 1913 it became the first Beethoven sketchbook to be published in facsimile. 2. Recent contributions to genetic criticism include Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and William Kinderman and Joseph E. Jones, eds., Genetic Criticism and the Creative Process: Essays from Music, Literature, and Theater (Rochester:UniversityofRochesterPress,2009).An interdisciplinary forum for genetic studies is the French journal Genesis: Revue internationale de critique génétique. The term “genetic criticism” does not yet have such wide currency outside of France but is used in the present study in broad reference to studies of the creative process.An important monograph series for genetic studies of musical works has been Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Lewis Lockwood from 1985 until 1997 and Malcolm Gillies since 1997. A number of analytical studies of twentieth-century music have made productive use of manuscript sources, especially those held in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland . One such recent study is Gretchen G. Horlacher, Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in the Music of Stravinsky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Much remains to be done, and the Sacher Archive, for instance, holds many extensive collections, including more than twenty thousand pages of sketches by György Kurtág and more than one hundred thousand pages of documents from Elliott Carter. 198 Notes to pages 2–4 3. In the “musicology”entry of the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,for instance,at least eleven largely autonomous divisions are described. On the increasing lack of integration of the discipline, see, among other sources, Lütteken ’s foreword toMusikwissenschaft:EinePositionsbestimmung,ed.Laurenz Lütteken (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2007), 10. 4. See Douglas Johnson, “Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven’s Sketches,” 19thCentury Music 2 (1978): 3–17, and my discussion of the issue in the introduction to Kinderman and Jones, Genetic Criticism, 6–7. 5. Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 99–100. Korsyn observes that even when Schenker’s analytical graphs reveal structural relations between movements, he cannot acknowledge them, which “constitutes a remarkable blind spot in his work but one with its own logic” (99). In practice, the “intertextuality of the déjà entendu” need not be regarded as infinite, as Robert Hatten observes in “The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies,” American Journal of Semiotics 3 (1985): 69–82. 6. Joseph Kerman,Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,1985),126.Kerman cites in this connection his earlier article “On William Byrd’s Emendemus in melius,” Musical Quarterly 44 (1963): 431–49, in which he already sought to draw in the results of “musicological” disciplines in order to explore “the aesthetic quality of the music itself” (Contemplating Music, 125). 7.LawrenceKramer,ClassicalMusicandPostmodernKnowledge(Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995), 25; Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 169. 8. Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 6. 9. McClary, Conventional Wisdom, 5. 10. See Lydia Goehr,The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon,1992),and the critique of her position by Reinhard Strohm, “Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept,” in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 128–52. 11. See my essay “Improvisation in Beethoven’s Creative Process,” in Musical Improvisation : Art, Education, and Society, ed. Gabriel Solis and Bruno Nettl (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 298–312, esp. 308; and Hatten’s chapter in the same volume, “Opening the Museum Window: Improvisation and Its Inscribed Values in Canonic Works by Chopin and Schumann” (281–95). 12.Hoffmannelevatestheexpressiveroleofmusicasamediumconveying“unaussprechliche Sehnsucht”(unspeakable yearning).Nor should Hoffmann be regarded solely as a proponent of a canon of musical works as autonomous entities. As Abigail Chandler observes in her book E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), Hoffmann also “fomented a critical methodology for the deconstruction of the musical ‘canon’” (180). 13.SeeinthisregardespeciallyCarlDahlhaus,TheIdeaofAbsoluteMusic,trans.Roger Lustig (Chicago: University...