Author Posting. (c) 'The Royal Musical Association', 2010. This is the author's version of the work.

It is posted here by permission of ' The Royal Musical Association ' for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Volume 135 Supplement 1, January 2010. doi:10.1080/02690400903414822 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690400903414822)

Listening and Responding to the Evidence of Early Twentieth-Century Performance

DANIEL LEECH-WILKINSON

IN an interview with Rob Cowan published in 2001 the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt discussed the reaction of a modern audience to a 1906 recording by Maria Galvany of the Queen of the Nights aria.1

There were 2500 people in the hall and the [lecturer] said [referring to Harnoncourt], I wonder what the Maestro will have to say about this. And then [the Galvany recording] started . Harnoncourt does a frenetic imitation [], then continues. The Vienna audience started to laugh. [] And when it came to the coloratura section of the aria, she accelerated wildly. It was fantastic! It was so perfect. I was flabbergasted. I had NEVER heard anything like it before. And still the audience laughed, the whole hall, all 2500 of them! [] So I rushed out the next day and bought the record. I played it to my students in Salzburg, and the effect was exactly the same: they laughed. And that was my most abiding impression: laughter. This was a real performance and where the audience should have been stunned, should have shouted fantastic!, they merely found it funny. Why?2

One answer might be that with the addition of wild tempo variations and a duetting cadenza for voice and flute Galvany rewrites the score. That is something an article on period listening could address: common practice 100 years ago, we find it hard to accept today, coming as we do after such a long period of textual puritanism and piety in relation to the dead composer. But that is not the focus of this study, and I do not think it is the main reason people why laugh at early recordings. There is nothing wrong with the piece she sings, unless one knows Mozarts score and is precious about it. Rather it is the way she sings that makes us laugh. And it is our reaction to that, to the strangeness of performance styles from the distant past, that I want to explore here. To give us something more to refer to, and something in which the notes are largely the composers, I would like to place alongside the Galvany a recording that tends to produce a similar reaction, a 1911 disc of Elena Gerhardt singing Schuberts An die Musik (D.547), accompanied by Arthur Nikisch.3 It will help to be reminded of the text, to which Gerhardt responds in a deeply personal way, communicating her response as if her life depended on it:

Schubert, An die Musik (Franz von Schober), D.547

Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden, Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt, Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden, Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrckt!

You lovely Art: in how many dark hours, when lifes wild tumult surrounded me, have you aroused my heart to warmer love, and transported me to a better world!

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen,

Often a sigh, escaping from your harp,

Ein ssser, heiliger Akkord von dir Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen, Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafr!

a sweet, holy chord from you, has shown me a heaven of better times; you lovely art, I thank you for this.

These two examples help us to focus on two of the key questions raised by early recordings.4 Why did people sing and play the notes on the page in ways that seem so strange to us? How can these pieces we know so well ever have made sense to people sung like this? And yet they did. Galvany had a major international career in opera; Gerhardt was one of the most celebrated singers of her time, and her accompanist Nikisch one of the best-known conductors. For Eddy Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor as late as 1951, Gerhardt as an interpreter of German song developed a mastery of phrasing, enunciation and tonecolour which have set a standard difficult to approach. Yet for John Austin, writing an Amazon review of a modern reissue in 2000,
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conductor Arthur Nikisch and soprano Elena Gerhardt were musicians of great renown in their day, but their 1911 performance of An die Musik is frankly appalling. Nikisch plays the opening accompaniment quickly, then slows to half speed when Gerhardt enters. What follows, for nearly four minutes, is not so much a tribute to music as a travesty of it. Altogether there is little offered by the early twentieth-century generation of singers that I should like young singers of today to hear.
6

What has changed? And what does John Austin fear might happen if young singers heard Gerhardt and her contemporaries? Was her performance always appalling, and was everybody who so admired her wrong? Or is it just that taste has changed? If that is really all, then is

4 taste a strong enough word to describe the reshaping of responses, of peoples whole notion of what is musical, to such an extent that a modern writer can fear for the musical health of the young? And if people have changed that much, why might hearing Gerhardt have any appeal for young singers today? What would be the danger in their hearing her? Clearly powerful emotions are involved in responses to performances like this, and we need to understand how such differences are possible and why people feel so strongly about them. I will deal with the question of otherness first. Why do people respond with incredulity to early recorded musicianship? Or to put it more simply, when we hear performances like Gerhardts, why do we laugh? Many of us, of course, do not any more: thanks to CD reissues we have got used to early recorded singing. Many find it exceptionally moving: those listeners have found a way of making sense of such responses to scores. But that sense seems not to come automatically for any listener brought up only on more modern performances. Playing recordings like this to students who have never encountered early twentieth-century singing, one still gets exactly the response Harnoncourt describes. They laugh. But why? One way of looking at this question would be via Freud and the extensive literature on laughter in philosophy and in literary studies.7 Another would be to use the growing literature on the psychology of laughter, which offers a number of answers to do with our mental responses to incongruity.8 But preferable to both of these approaches may be to use current research on perception together with recent work on music and evolution. I believe that we can get interesting and plausible answers from looking at the most fundamental levels underlying music cognition. Laughter is an automatic response with a long evolutionary history. Children [] born blind and deaf, [who] have never heard laughter or seen a smile, [] nevertheless laugh and

5 smile when tickled.9 When you tickle one of our closest relatives, a chimpanzee, she produces laughter-like sounds as like as they can be, given our different vocal physiologies.10 And laughter involves the limbic system, one of the oldest parts of the brain in terms of evolution.11 Human infants begin to laugh at between fourteen and sixteen weeks, and it is an important shared element in infant-carer communication.12 This raises the possibility that laughter may be linked to the relationship I have proposed in a recent article between portamento and the overt emotion of early twentieth-century performances that use it and the pitch glides of infant-directed speech.13 Briefly, I suggested that music was understood somewhat differently after the First World War, and much more so after the Second, and that performance style changed accordingly by cutting out gradually after the First War and suddenly after the Second portamento and extreme rubato and replacing them with other less emotionally evocative means of signalling deep feeling, above all vibrato. I proposed that the naivety of linking musical responses to our earliest loving relationships, achieved by portamento, became unacceptable and embarrassing later on for entirely cultural reasons. Thus something hardwired into us through natural selection and found all over the world babies predisposition to feel secure in response to gliding pitch vocalizations was used extensively by musicians in a cultural context in which it was acceptable to think of music as comforting and reassuring, but was vigorously excluded once that view of music became culturally unacceptable, once music began to be seen as responding to subconscious motives and social conflict. If, as seems to be the case, laughter is part of the same set of infant-carer communicative responses, then a laughing or smiling reaction to early twentieth-century performances might not be so strange. But this seems to me to get the whole matter back to front. We do not laugh at early recordings because they

make us feel safe, but because they make us feel alienated, and alienated from something that we thought we understood, namely music we love and the manner in which people are musical with it. We might do better to look for some underlying mechanisms. It is now widely recognized among anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists that musical ability has been selected for; and the evolution of music as currently theorized, with its origins in primate calls, and with a precursor shared with language, explains a lot of what is now known about how music is handled by the brain.14 Our responses to music, as research in many areas is now showing, go far deeper than things we learn within our own various cultures.15 And so to our understanding of how we respond to recordings that bring us performances from social environments that now seem quite foreign, theories of musical communication have quite a lot to offer.16 I am going to use several, in order to see how our response to Galvany and Gerhardt looks from the viewpoint of each. Watt and Ash have proposed, on the basis of empirical research, that we respond to music as if it were a person.17 We imagine music as initiating movement and as having intentions. Musicologists often talk this way. Music is said to converse, to argue, to move, to feel, and so on. So let us treat Gerhardts performance to begin with as if it were a person a person from 1911 since it is the time dislocation that is at the root of our difficulty with it and ask ourselves how we would feel if we were suddenly confronted by one of these singers or by a contemporary if she came onto a concert stage, dressed for her time, speaking in the vocabulary and accent of 1911, and using the gestures typical of her class, and began to address us as if we belonged to an audience of her contemporaries. That would be discomforting, to say the least. It would not, I think, be much like TV costume drama or even theatre. Modern people acting, however well, do not make a facsimile of past modes of

communication. If they did, we would not be able to empathize with them and there could be little or no communication between actor and audience: for acting to work there has to be compromise with our own period expectations. So I am not asking readers to imagine Judi Dench as Lady Bracknell, but something much less familiar. It is a pity that sound reached the movies so late, because we cannot see and hear people interacting and communicating emotionally until after 1923. Even then, they do so in ways we should find ludicrous today, and it takes some familiarity with their codes of behaviour for us to watch early talkies without amusement: I doubt if we ever feel completely at home with the modes of communication we see in them. So when Gerhardt sings about her feelings for music, she makes that music behave like a person with whose behaviour we have precious little in common. If we were transplanted into her time, and were surrounded by others like her, I suggest that we would feel exceedingly insecure. If she were transplanted here, so that only she seemed out of place, we would find it hard not to laugh. So laughter as a response to Gerhardts performance seems consistent with Watt and Ashs theory. We treat the music as a person dressed up by manners we can no longer understand or associate with it. Another approach to theorizing musical communication is the motor-mimetic theory of speech perception, most recently formulated for music by Arnie Cox and set out in slightly different terms by John Sloboda, Patrik Juslin and a number of others.18 The motor-mimetic theory suggests that we understand what a musical performance means by imagining what it would be like to perform it that way ourselves. We hear sounds, sense what state of mind we would be in or what we would feel like if we were producing them, and understand the meaning of those sounds accordingly. For example, we hear a trembling voice, we know from our own experience what kinds of feelings have a trembling voice as their symptom, and we

imagine that the speaker must be deeply upset or fearful. So how would we understand what Gerhardt is doing with An die Musik? I am not sure that we could. We do not sing that way, we do not know how it feels, and if we try to imagine it we cannot see what those feelings could possibly have to do with Schubert, whom we now see quite differently. We seem to be hearing notes we know, but wildly misrepresented. If some people still sang this way, or if we belonged to Sackville-West and Shawe-Taylors generation and could remember people singing this way, we should have some chance of at least recognizing that some other codes of communication were in play; but since they do not, and we are not, we assume that what we hear is nonsense. And so we laugh. Both these theories easily explain our response. Musical communication just cannot work through such a large discrepancy in performance style.19 Let us look at these performances, and our reaction, in the light of two current theories of musics evolutionary purpose. Clearly, if our musical faculties have evolved for particular purposes then performances that, for the sorts of reasons we have just seen, could not have those functions for us are going to seem incongruous, if not incomprehensible. The most widely accepted current theory, that musics evolutionary purpose was to promote social cohesion and group coordination, is being extended in fascinating directions by Ian Cross.20 For Cross, music may very well have had a crucial role in the emergence of human culture, one of whose defining features is the strength and effectiveness of its group cooperation. The rhythmic function of music here, getting people to move and sing together as one, is easy to see: by making music together, hominids who might otherwise manage only limited cooperation would be enabled to work as a group, improving a sense of community and shared purpose in other activities as a result, for example in hunting, feeding and mutual protection.

9 Musics use in coordinating emotions needs a bit more explanation, and this is Crosss most powerful insight. Musics defining peculiarity is that every member of a group can be emotionally affected by it in a different way without anyone being aware of the differences. Individuals find meanings in music that seem true for themselves while believing that they are having a powerful shared experience with others. And this makes music uniquely effective at creating social cohesion. Indeed it is impossible to think of anything else that can do this so safely. In social groups of early hominids, where language and social bonds were not yet up to overcoming competing self-interests, musical ability, permitting the strengthening of cooperation and a sense of belonging, would have offered a very considerable survival premium. It would be consistent with everything else we know about our early ancestors, and with the evidence of vocal communication among animals as substantially territorial in purpose, for hominid groups each to have somewhat distinct musical practices. Like primates, groups would use musical practices as territorial definers, markers of their group identity. Musical practices of an alien group would be challenging if not threatening. It is possible, then, that we do still have the neural basis for finding unfamiliar musical styles worrying. For our ancestors, the musical style of an alien group, far from promoting cohesion, might have fostered fear or aggression. In modern cultures, of course, we do not think of different musical traditions in that way, but neither do we find them easy to assimilate or to feel comfortable with. Our own music represented by a foreign music-cultural tradition is bizarre, if not actually irritating. Consider the snobbish and all-too revealing example of the Monty Python launderette ladies discussing Jean-Paul Sartre.21 It was the perceived mismatch between their dress, accent and manner, on the one hand, and expectations of people at home

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with regard to the concepts of existentialism, on the other, that caused audiences to laugh. And so it is with Gerhardts Schubert. When we hear her we look for an analogy that is close to hand, and we find perhaps a drunken countertenor hamming it up? The other major theory of musics evolutionary purpose is also potentially relevant. According to Geoffrey Miller, music is what happens when a smart, group-living, anthropoid ape stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of runaway sexual selection for complex acoustic displays.22 Like the proverbial peacocks tail, the ability to sing well is taken as a sign of power the animal has the strength to survive despite putting himself at risk of attack from predators by stopping and singing extravagantly, and so females are successfully attracted. Runaway selection, the process by which ever more extravagant vocal displays are required to out-bid rival males, leads vocalizations to develop into ever more sophisticated forms leading over time to human music. For Miller his point is only underlined by the fact that many human males under the age of 30 are busy in their bedrooms trying to become the next Jimi Hendrix, and that those who succeed will mate with as many groupies as they can. Of course there are problems with this theory. Many of Millers detailed supporting arguments (for example, the preponderance of male composers listed in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) are based on evidence that needs further sifting. And his observation that in primates singing and monogamy go together, while true, is of doubtful application among human musicians, as any time spent in the average opera chorus will quickly show. Runaway selection is rather a plausible explanation, though, for some extremes of human composition and performance style, for instance the fourteenth-century ars subtilior or twentieth-century atonality or, indeed, the ultra-expressive singing and playing characteristic of the first 30 years of recording. Whether any of these was an effective way of

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attracting sexual partners is perhaps no longer the point. Runaway selection could be fired almost as powerfully by economic gain, by popular acclaim or (in the case of composition) by peer-group esteem (which provides an almost complete explanation for integral serialism). But if sexual competition drove the development of musical skills in the past it is unlikely to have gone away entirely. There is an easy test for this. If singing is a form of sexually selected courtship display, then listeners at some level are potential mates and are judging singers (and presumably by extension players) as potential sexual partners. Do we find the good singers sexier than the bad? Given appropriate examples of good and bad singers (agreed by experts and general listeners) it would not be hard to test large numbers of subjects as to their preferred blind date. If singing is a form of courtship display, then an out-of-style performance would be ridiculous, a musical equivalent of Queen Victoria or Mr Gladstone trying to seduce one, or, if you prefer a more literary analogy, of Malvolio yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered. We should laugh, just as we do at poor Elena Gerhardt, whose efforts to convince us of her love for music would now be quite wasted. All these theories have the potential to offer plausible explanations of the mechanisms underlying our problem with accepting early recorded styles of singing. Of course, we are not aware of the mechanisms when we respond unfavourably to what we hear coming off cylinders and 78s. Our sense of what is wrong is constructed at a higher level than that. But the sense that such performances are in some degree dangerous for impressionable performers today, the sense that worried John Austin about Gerhardt, may well be founded on some very real automatic responses. <line space>

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The second key question raised above was to do with how listeners are able to make sense of such different performance styles. How could Galvany and Gerhardt ever have seemed appropriate for music Mozart, Schubert we think we know so well? How might we make sense of their recordings now, in our very different music-cultural environments? Again, these are questions that could be addressed using standard musicological approaches to theorizing culture. But however one looks at meaning in music as shaped through performance, in the end what is experienced depends on the ways in which brains process musical sound, and sooner or later what is known of that process (knowledge constantly being refined) will have to be taken into account. Musicology, and especially musicology that foregrounds hermeneutics, fears science, anxious that it reinsinuates positivism: the assumption is that subjective response to music will be devalued or its importance diminished. But that is not what recent work on music and the brain suggests at all. On the contrary, the more that is understood about musics construction in the mind (or at any rate is suggested by increasing evidence), the easier it becomes to understand just why music is so personal and yet so widely shared.23 To begin to answer these more pressing questions about the ways in which early recorded singing (and singing in general) constructs meanings, it helps first of all to think about musics interaction with our perception of time and feeling. Music shapes time, that is to say it changes quite markedly over small spans of time, and gives those moments a character that if we are listening absorbs us and occupies us (in both senses of the word). It uses our time and it takes us over and entrains us or, in Tia DeNoras notion, configures us to the template it provides.24 If we allow it to, it will reconfigure our feelings for as long as it lasts, and for a little while afterwards.25 And it does so partly by applying its shapes to our perception of time

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and mood, shapes created by processes of change in all the dimensions of sound (frequency, timing and loudness). By changing frequency, timing or loudness, a performer shapes a musical moment and thereby shapes our perception of and response to it.26 By shaping time, music behaves like many other kinds of sensation, like other kinds of sounds, like objects moving through space, like the movement of people, like almost any process one can see, and above all like our feelings. And so music can model just about anything that involves change over time.27 How this works is in principle very simple, and increasingly the mechanism underlying it (which is the really interesting thing) is beginning to be understood. Our perceptual system for sound has evolved to enable us to identify opportunities and threats in the environment. Attributes have been selected that enable us most quickly to isolate a sound from its acoustic environment,28 to identify the source of sound and from there to construct its meaning (that is to say, its implications or affordances) for us. A crucial part of this identification and response consists of comparing current incoming sounds with patterns of sound just perceived, and responding more strongly to differences than to similarities.29 Change is always significant, and this has important implications for our response to music which, as music theorists and music psychologists since Leonard Mayer have repeatedly argued, depends to a considerable extent on the relationship between expectation and fulfilment.30 Just as important is establishing the source of a sound does it imply a threat or an opportunity? and this necessarily involves the comparison of incoming sounds to sounds already known. The likeness of a musical sound to things we already know about is fundamental to the meaning we give it. All forms of musical representation derive from this, not just the pictorialism of certain kinds of composition and performance, but much more subtle signals coded by a musical sounds likeness to something else, including things

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whose similarity we sense but are quite unable to explain. I report an experiment below which illustrates this particularly well. Most of this process of comparison is automatic necessarily so because speed and accuracy enhanced survival and involves mapping both within and between domains (audio, visual, haptic, kinetic), generating perceived likenesses that may range from motional to emotional,31 and simultaneously at a more personal level may involve associations unique to each listener.32 To do the data matching that finds likenesses, the brain first analyses sounds into components (frequencies, timings, loudnesses): it makes a spectrum analysis.33 Our ears and auditory cortexes are operating an organic spectrum analyser, but unlike a software analyser that displays the results in detail on screen the output is not made directly available to consciousness: that would produce immediate sensory overload. Rather it has to be synthesized into a holistic percept, albeit one which may mix many competing qualities. To achieve this the auditory cortex sends the acoustic data along two routes. One goes to the limbic system and hypothalamus, the emotion-generating centres, which return an emotional percept. That is the quick route to consciousness, which explains why, however one tries to suppress it in certain situations (Noel Cowards phrase about the potency of cheap music has become a clich for precisely this reason), the first thing one feels about music is emotional. The second route synthesizes out of the acoustic data a variety of musical functions timbre, contour, metre, rhythm, harmony, syntax. Evidence from victims of brain damage, who can lose each of these abilities independently of the others, suggests that there may be separate neural networks processing each.35 What happens next remains to be shown in any detail, but a reasonable hypothesis is that, having analysed incoming sounds into both these sets of features (the acoustic components and the musical components), the brain looks for things it
34

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knows about that have similar features in their own constituent elements. And because the components are so basic, similar features can be found across different domains, between sound and vision, for example, or between sound and feeling.36 A nice demonstration of this process in action is provided in a recent study by Eitan and Timmers which collected pairs of terms from a variety of cultures for what in the West is known as high and low pitch, and did a series of experiments with Israeli participants to assess the extent to which they were mapped consistently onto high and low.37 Pairs of terms included light/heavy (Liberia), sharp/heavy (ancient Greece), small/large (Indonesia), young/old (Amazon basin and Zimbabwe), weak/strong (central Africa), stable/mad, thin/thick (both from Zimbabwe) and grandmother/daughter (Central African Republic), together with numerous other pairs used in previous studies (including active/passive, alert/sleepy, fast/slow, feminine/masculine, light/dark, summer/winter, tense/relaxed). Participants consistently agreed by a factor of around 9:1 (usually more) about which term signified high and which low pitch. Clearly that could not be the case if these terms were assigned arbitrarily by cultural chance. There must be common features underlying all these pairs of images, features determined by the effect of contrasting frequency bands on the human body. While the Israelis used for these tests may well have had diverse ethnic backgrounds, the remarkably high agreement between participants needs to be replicated using musical listeners from widely separated cultures (including those whose terms were used). But so far this elegant series of experiments strongly suggests that there is a level on which musical metaphor is constructed by the brain that is subject to neither personal nor cultural determination. These concepts (high, sharp, young, bright ; low, blunt, old, dull ) are apparently not abstract unities, nor arbitrary symbols, but rather assemblages that include

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perceptible properties present in the corresponding pole of every pair, together with properties unique to each. By recognizing the common components, the brain is able to connect them all together. The ability to make connections between sounds and other things at this deep level would offer an immensely flexible means for finding meaning in music. Consider the quantity of data that a moments music offers, and then consider the immeasurably vast quantity of such information about everything we experience that is already represented in our brains. 150 trillion synapses can do a lot of relationship building.38 The chances of finding a match between incoming sound and things the brain already knows about are very high. A musical phrase, particularly because it is so abstract (just shapes in frequency, timing and loudness), is hard put to it not to be reminiscent of something, and that something is not necessarily just other music. It may be; or it may be something else entirely, something much more concrete: a walk, a quality of light, a manner of expression, a surge of feeling. So, there are good reasons to suppose that as we listen to music many different signals are being considered and aspects of them compared and matched. The more related likenesses the brain finds, or the stronger the similarity, the more the match becomes a conscious percept.39 The key point is that what is found strongly enough to become a percept depends on what is in each brain, and how important it seems there, which is why music can be so different for each of us. The process encourages the personalization of musical experience. This is where subjectivity is constructed as music shapes us and we shape it. Coming at the problem from this angle one can easily reconcile the as-it-were absolute nature of music, sounds being related to sounds, with its extraordinary ability to represent, to take on meaning by becoming very far from absolute. Evidently it can be both at once, indeed a great many things at once,

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because a great many likenesses can be returned to consciousness. So music acquires meaning partly by seeming like other things. And these similarities can be produced in multiple ways (which is going to help us understand how performance style can change and still make new sense of the same scores). Sometimes music is like specific things, but at the same time it is also like shaped feeling, a sense of increasing or decreasing affect. And all that is needed to model that is change. Change is key to how expressive performance works. Changes can be of many different degrees in different dimensions of sound, according to what ones instrument can adjust: frequency, timing and loudness for a singer or string player, timing and loudness for a pianist, timing for a harpsichordist, for example. And changes in these dimensions, where they are possible, can be combined in different ways. So, coming back to performance style, a performance style like Elena Gerhardts is simply a particular collection of ways of effecting change in musical sound in relation to the notional values of the score. Put together the brains ability to find similarities between many things with the extreme flexibility in what can be expressive, and you have a vast range of options for musical expressivity. Only a small set is required by a particular performance style at a particular moment, a period style, and an even smaller set for a personal style. But potentially there are always other possible sets, their details constrained only by what is physically possible on an instrument. There are innumerable potential performance styles floating around in a sea of feasible variability. Two questions follow. What drives change in performance style, and how are the options that get used in actual performance styles selected? The first question what drives performance style change I have dealt with in depth in a chapter for the Cambridge

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Companion to Recorded Music, which draws especially on recent theories of cultural selection to show how processes found also in natural selection could produce the natures and rates of change that we see in musical performance style.40 Processes identical to those of runaway sexual selection and optimal foraging principles, coupled with the economics and cultural politics of performance among other factors encourage the accumulation of very small changes in ways of being musical which for the most part are unnoticeable individually. However, over relatively short spans of time a generation or two these accumulate to produce very noticeable differences across a whole performance culture, and so much difference over a century that until we become familiar with an other style from that long ago we barely recognize that people are being musical at all. This may be the problem modern listeners have with Galvany and Gerhardt. The other thing we need, as noted above, is a reason for some performance habits to be found more attractive than other possibilities in one place and at one time. How do styles selfselect? It seems inevitable that they must be related to other things, things outside performance, not necessarily just following them but interacting, so that change moves along in many cultural domains through their interrelationships. How we work this out and show it happening, one domain changing alongside another, is a massive problem. How can we begin to relate Elena Gerhardts singing to her time? I have made a very small start at this in another forthcoming study that compares recordings and writings about the same pieces, and finds clear instances of writings being driven by recordings (my examples are of Richard Capells and Lawrence Kramers writings on Schubert songs from the 1920s and 1990s).41 But I also find clear cases of performance styles being driven by ideas, and my examples here are historically informed performance, on the one hand, and, on the other, the pointillism in the

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performance of avant-garde scores from the 1950s to the 70s, giving way in the 90s and 00s to an opposite focus on melodic continuity. Writings on music offer a way in, but there is a huge gap to bridge between them and other kinds of communication styles such as conversation, comedy, fashion and the vocabulary of intimacy (the latter perhaps especially relevant to music). Adorno made an attempt at this kind of cross-relating of performance and culture, comparing Toscanini with polished automobile chrome;42 but without understanding the mechanisms that link these domains this throwing of metaphors in the dark in the hope that something will stick is not really going to get us far. There is a lot of research to do before we can do better than guess at relationships between performance style and other changing manners of expression and communication. To confuse the picture, the ability we now have, thanks to recording, to look back on 100 years of recorded performance has for the first time in history exposed us to many different styles and musical cultures simultaneously. The brains ability to generate different styles of course brings a corresponding technical ability to comprehend a range of style, not just the style with which we have grown up, although of course that technical ability to comprehend others may be blocked by cultural pressure not to do so. But given enough exposure to different performance styles, we can make some sense of them: not necessarily the original sense their performances may not mean the same to us as to them, in fact surely will not but if we make a sense of them, that is all that is required. We cannot use recordings to recreate past perceptions (at least it would be cautious to suppose not, although it is a wonderful idea), but potentially we can perceive musical sense in old performance styles, just as we can in new ones: the old styles are just stranger than the new ones, obviously, because they were formed for a different culture. But I think we are just starting to see, because people

20

have gone far enough in this direction over the past ten years to make it unmistakeable, that old styles are beginning to inform new ones.43 <line space> We may now be in a better position to return to the confrontation between modern musical listening and Elena Gerhardts personal style. It brings us face to face with another aspect of the problem of early recordings. Eric Clarke has talked of the critical discomfort that one senses among some past writers of analysis with the agency of the composer, the idea that the composer is doing things to us with musical materials.44 And similarly there has been a strong tendency recently to find other desires at work on both sides of the equation (composer and listener) of which neither is aware.45 The same critical discomfort exists, I think, over the agency of the performer. The notion that the performer has power over us is one that many feel a strong need to refuse,46 because it is objectionable on so many ideological grounds. But this is what music does: it changes us. And like the proverbial TV viewer and the off button, we have a choice as listeners, and we exercise that choice every time we listen, to refuse to give in to a performers style, to accept it and be moved by it. But then again, in choosing to refuse it we are not always successful, which causes resentment. But in principle you choose as a listener whether to give yourself over to the performers fictional (or, who knows, real) subjectivity, subjectivity modelled by sound applied to a score. The reluctance to do so, to accept and share the performers apparent subjectivity while the performance lasts, is especially strong for many modern listeners when it comes to the highly expressive performers of Gerhardts generation, the 1910s, 20s and 30s, in whose performances a construction of subjectivity is so powerfully modelled. As indeed it is in the recordings of their modern counterparts. I highly recommend a comparison of Elena

21 Gerhardts Der Wegweiser from 1927 with that of Nathalie Stutzmann from 2003.47 Both are flexible in a way that would have been unacceptable in the interim (and remains so to many, as was clear from the mixed online response to my recommendation in a BBC radio programme of Stutzmann as a singer of Winterreise).48 We can hardly be in any doubt that these singers are encouraging us to feel deeply as we listen. However, it is not their feelings about the music which trouble us, I suggest, but rather the intensity of their expression. We agree about the moments in a piece that need emphasis, but not at all about how much or what kind of emphasis there should be. So the question, faced with a powerfully, explicitly emotional performance, is always: Can I give myself over to this persona, constructed for me by this performer on this occasion? What will be the benefits for me if I do? Shall I enjoy feeling the piece this way, or will it discomfort me? Am I happy to be seen to enjoy feeling it this way, or do I feel ashamed? For some, performances like these Gerhardt, Stutzmann may be too personal, too revealing, may admit to too much of the emotional, self-indulgent, romantic sensibility so often denounced by proponents of historically informed performance, complaints redolent of the accusations of irrationality, femininity and depravity that Said found in Orientalist constructions of the non-Western other.49 Early recordings force us to confront the extremely narrow constraints constraints of culture and within culture of taste which limit our ability to accept a modelling of a performers subjectivity as appropriate. Relatively few styles of modelling feel comfortable at any one time, fewer still for any one performer; and fewer even than that may be admissible ways of representing our own feelings about a piece of music. And what people tend to do, therefore, is to transfer their discomfort with the entrainment of feelings the performer offers

22

us, as listeners, across to the piece. Rather than admit that the performance is representing something of us, we declare that it is misrepresenting the piece, and we condemn that instead. But what is happening is much more personal than that. A performance is an offer from the performer to us to become one with them in their modelling of feeling. Rather than admit that our own subjectivity is being reshaped, we say the piece is being misshaped. We say thats not Schubert when really we feel thats not me. Or, more probably, thats not a me Im prepared to admit to. There comes a point, though, when the modelling is so foreign, because signals have changed so much in their meaning, that we simply laugh. That is what happens with Gerhardts An die Musik for listeners unused to her expressive world. Those sounds now mean other things, rather ridiculous things. And refusal to accept them as appropriately musical is perhaps fair enough in the first instance. It takes either remarkable historical curiosity, or simply much more exposure to these kinds of performances, before one can feel any kind of understanding. But then they become very interesting indeed. And this is why early recordings make such a good place to start thinking about performance. They throw up the question of style and meaning in the starkest contrast. If we can get a handle on how sound generates meaning here we shall be in a much better position to understand more familiar constructions of musical experience. Listening to early recordings opens up questions about how we respond to music that we could never have faced unless recording had been invented and until recordings had been accumulating for a long while. No one, until recently, could have suspected that music-making changes so much over time. But now these questions can hardly be avoided. Between them, recordings questioning much of what we have believed about musical communication and the

23 neuroscience of music offering methodologies for arriving at knowledge of it change everything. What the long-term consequences will be for scholarship remains to be seen. We can say with confidence, however, that listening making sense of what is heard is a cultural practice subject to constant evolution and at the same time a biological process. And between these there is no meaningful distinction to be made.

24

Footnotes
1

A transfer by Andrew Hallifax of the 1906 recording may be downloaded from

<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/music/dlw/sound/4728h.flac>. For help in playing FLAC files see <http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/sound/sound.html#flac_help>.

2

Rob Cowen, interview with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gramophone, 79 (November 2001), 1011. My

thanks to Edward Taylor for this reference. The recording was reproduced in the accompanying cover CD (GCD 1101, track 12), taken from EMI CMS7 63750-2.
3

A sound file is again available for download:

<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/music/dlw/sound/ac5112f.flac>.
4

The following three paragraphs, including the quotation, and two others later, were extracted from a

preliminary draft of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to the Study of Recorded Musical Performances (London, 2009: <http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html>).
5

Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Record Guide (London, 1951; 2nd, rev.

edn, 1955), 529.

6

<http://www.amazon.com/Schubert-Lieder-Record-Vol-1898-1939/dp/B000005GTK>, accessed 14

April 2009.
7

Sigmund Freud, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (London, 2003);

Mary Eloise Ragland, The Language of Laughter, SubStance, 5 (1976), 91106; N. J. C. Vasantkumar, Postmodernism and Jokes, The Postmodern Presence: Readings on Postmodernism in American Culture and Society, ed. Arthur Asa Berger (Walnut Creek, CA, 1997), 21238; Frances Gray, Women and Laughter (Charlottesville, VA, 1994); John Morreal, Taking Laughter Seriously (Albany, NY, 1983).
8

Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (London, 2001); Herbert M. Lefcourt,

Humor: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly (New York and London, 2001).

25

Stephen Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

(London, 2005), 82.

10

T. Matsusaka, When Does Play Panting Occur during Social Play in Wild Chimpanzees?,

Primates, 45 (2004), 2219.

11

Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 823. Ibid., 81. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Portamento and Musical Meaning, Journal of Musicological Research,

12

13

25 (2006), 23361.
14

Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and

Cognition (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals; Steven Brown, The Musilanguage Model of Music Evolution, The Origins of Music, ed. Nils L. Wallin, Bjrn Merker and Steven Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 271300. See also Steven Brown, Contagious Heterophony: A New Theory about the Origins of Music, Musicae scientiae, 11 (2007), 326.
15

See especially the literature cited on lullabies in Leech-Wilkinson, Portamento, and the more recent

Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
16

An excellent survey of approaches is Musical Communication, ed. Dorothy Miell, Raymond

Macdonald and David J. Hargreaves (Oxford, 2005).

17

Roger J. Watt and Roisn L. Ash, A Psychological Investigation of Meaning in Music, Musicae

scientiae, 2 (1998), 3353.

18

Alvin M. Liberman and Ignatius G. Mattingly, The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised,

Cognition, 21 (1985), 136; John Sloboda, Does Music Mean Anything?, Musicae scientiae, 2 (1998), 2132, repr. in idem, Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function (Oxford, 2005), 16372; Patrik N. Juslin, Communicating Emotion in Music Performance: A Review and Theoretical Framework, Music and Emotion: Theory and Research, ed. idem and John A. Sloboda

26

(Oxford, 2001), 30937; Arnie Cox, The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning, Musicae scientiae, 5 (2001), 195212. For a philosophical approach towards the same theory see Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia, PA, 1989), and Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, NY, 1994), esp. chapter 5.
19

The single case that comes close to disproving this conclusion is that of Glenn Gould, whose highly

unusual manner of performance, possibly an expression of Aspergers Syndrome, seems to lie beyond the norms of the period style. How Gould nevertheless made a career as a player is a fascinating issue and deserves much more focused study. On Gould and Aspergers see S. Timothy Maloney, Glenn Gould: Autistic Savant, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Learner and Joseph N. Straus (New York, 2006), 12135.
20

Among many recent studies by Cross see especially Music and Meaning, Ambiguity and

Evolution, Musical Communication, ed. Miell et al., 2743; Music and Cognitive Evolution, The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Robin Dunbar and Louise Barrett (Oxford, 2007), 64967; and The Evolutionary Nature of Musical Meaning, Musicae scientiae (forthcoming).
21

Monty Pythons Flying Circus: Just the Words, ed. Roger Wilmut, 2 vols. (London, 1989), ii, 537. Geoffrey Miller, Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection, The Origins of Music, ed.

22

Wallin et al., 32960 (p. 349).

23

For a sample of recent work see The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, ed. Isabelle Peretz and

Robert Zatorre (Oxford, 2003); Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and Sloboda; and The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut (Oxford, 2009).
24

Tia DeNora, Music as a Technology of the Self, Poetics, 27 (1999), 3156; eadem, Historical

Perspectives in Music Sociology, Poetics, 32 (2004), 21121 (p. 218).

25

The strongest examples of musics power in this respect come from music therapy. See, for example,

Kari Batt-Rawden, Susan Trythall and Tia De Nora, Health Musicking as Cultural Inclusion, Music: Promoting Health and Creating Community in Healthcare Contexts, ed. Jane Edwards (Cambridge,

27

2007), 6482.
26

Among numerous other studies see John Sloboda and Andreas Lehmann, Performance Correlates of

Perceived Emotionality in Different Interpretations of a Chopin Piano Prelude, Music Perception, 19 (2001), 87120; Klaus Scherer, Vocal Expression of Emotion, Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer and H. Hill Goldsmith (Oxford, 2003), 43356; and Patrik Juslin and Petri Laukka, Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance: Different Channels, Same Code?, Psychological Bulletin, 129 (2003), 770814.
27

Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music, esp. chapter 8, paragraphs 1019. Arthur N. Popper and Richard R. Fay, Evolution of the Ear and Hearing: Issues and Questions,

28

Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 50 (1997), 21321.

29

Laurel J. Trainor and Robert J. Zatorre, The Neurobiological Basis of Musical Expectations, The

Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Hallam et al., 17183.

30

See especially David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation

(Cambridge, MA, 2006).

31

See for example Zohar Eitan and Roni Y. Granot, How Music Moves: Musical Parameters and

Images of Motion, Music Perception, 23 (2006), 22147, and Juslin and Laukka, Communication of Emotions.
32

Alf Gabrielsson, Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music, Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and

Sloboda, 43149.
33

For a clear introduction see Thomas Stainsby and Ian Cross, The Perception of Pitch, The Oxford

Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Hallam et al., 4758.

34

The best synthesis of the recent evidence is in Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 628. See especially Isabelle Peretz, Brain Specialization for Music: New Evidence from Congenital

35

Amusia, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, ed. Peretz and Zatorre, 192203.
36

Synaesthesia, the state in which this happens automatically and permanently, has generated much

28

significant research into the neurological basis for this blending or cross-domain mapping. See especially Richard E. Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
37

Zohar Eitan and Renee Timmers, Beethovens Last Piano Sonata and Those Who Follow

Crocodiles: Cross-Domain Mappings of Auditory Pitch in a Musical Context (forthcoming, 2009). I am extremely grateful to the authors for allowing me to see a typescript. A summary of a conference presentation appears in 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 6th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music: Abstracts, ed. Mario Baroni, Anna Rita Addessi, Roberto Caterina and Marco Costa (University of Bologna, 2226 August, 2006), 2867.
38

The estimate is arrived at in Bente Pakkenberg, Dorte Pelvig, Lisbeth Marner, Mads J. Bundgaard,

Hans Jorgen G. Gundersen, Jens R. Nyengaard and Lisbeth Regeur, Aging and the Human Neocortex, Experimental Gerontology, 38 (2003), 959.
39

For this theory of consciousness see especially Susan Greenfield, The Private Life of the Brain:

Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self (New York, 2000).
40

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Recordings and Histories of Performance Style, The Cambridge

Companion to Recorded Music, ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (Cambridge, 2009). See also Stephen Shennan, Genes, Memes and Human History (London, 2002), and Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago, IL, 2005). For an earlier working-out of this approach see LeechWilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music, chapter 7, paragraphs 2032.
41

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Musicology and Performance, Musics Intellectual History: Founders,

Followers and Fads, ed. Zdravko Blaekovi (New York, forthcoming). The material on Schubert song is also to be found in The Changing Sound of Music, chapter 4, paragraphs 213 and 3745.
42

Theodor W. Adorno, The Mastery of the Maestro, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(Stanford, CA, 1999), 4053 (p. 41, and cf. p. 52 on Cadillacs).

29

43

More examples appear in recordings every year. For a tiny sample I recommend the violinist Rachel

Barton Pine in the Brahms and Joachim concertos (Cedille Records, CDR 90000 068, rec. 2002), and the recordings of Schuberts Winterreise by Christine Schfer with Eric Schneider (Onyx Classics, ONYX 4010, rec. 2003) and by Nathalie Stutzmann with Inger Sdergren (Calliope CAL 9339, rec. 2003).
44

In a series of lectures (forthcoming in book form) on Musical Subjectivities, this one entitled

Constructing/Composition Subjectivities, The British Library, 16 February 2009.

45

To mention just one example, see Lawrence Kramers essay on Schumanns Carnaval in Musical

Meaning: Towards a Critical History (Berkeley, CA, 2002), chapter 5.

46

Kramers Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley, CA, 2007) is particularly interesting here,

recognizing finally the power of performance to remake a score and the corresponding limitations of score to encode a work.
47

Elena Gerhardt with Coenraad V. Bos (piano), Schubert: Der Wegweiser (Winterreise, D.911, song

20), HMV matrix Cc10435-2, rec. 11 March 1927, issued on HMV D 1264, HMV EJ 154, HMV ES 275, Victor 6838 and Victor ND 535. Available for download from <http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/mbi/>. Stutzmann, as in note 43 above, track 20.
48

Building a Library, CD Review, BBC Radio 3, 7 February 2009. A treasure-trove of negative rhetoric along these lines is reconstructed in Bruce Haynes, The End of

49

Early Music: A Period Performers History of Music (New York, 2007), esp. chapter 3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).