The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

    + Sugar.
    + Spice.
    + Wine.
    + Macaroni.
    + Tooth powder.
This short shopping list was drawn up in case Caspar Bauer, a representative in England of the Esterházy Court, were to come to dinner that evening. In the event, he didn’t, but this brief entry illustrates two things: first, the kind of minute attention to detail that characterises the work of the documentary musicologist, ready to unearth the smallest detail of a composer’s daily needs and habits in the quest for completeness. Second, that Beethoven was mortal, with the kind of mundane, day-to-day concerns that afflict all of us; in short, that he was human. This last point needs emphasising, because since at least the mid-nineteenth century (when the Great Music project really got underway) the great composers have been raised up to quasi-mythical status, their busts adorning the facades of opera houses, concert halls, libraries, and the private studies of those with artistic pretensions. Their monuments populate squares and parks, while their private lives are pored over for the slightest detail that might prove artistically significant.

The obsession with composers’ appearances and lives has cast long shadows over their output. It is almost impossible to engage in discussion of Beethoven’s music without mention of his deafness, or the personal crisis that resulted in the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’, or the identity of his ‘Immortal Beloved’, or his hero-worship (culminating in profound disillusionment) of Napoleon Bonaparte. With Shostakovich, it’s his recurring victimisation at the hands of the Soviet regime (and the veracity of the posthumously published Testimony) that overshadows the music, with Tchaikovsky his catastrophic marriage and battles with ‘Fate’, with Janáček his ‘muse’ Kamila Stösslová (not to mention his immersion in folk and speech melodies), with Schubert his sexuality, and so on… All these biographical details (some rooted loosely in fact, others more conjectural) form pegs from which to hang the musical works, denying the latter a life of their own.

No doubt this situation is the result of our need for ‘heroes’ or role-models, for exemplars of artistic achievement. And evidence for this is to be found not just among the ranks of composers (whom we still tend to divide into the ‘great’ and the second- (or third, or fifth-) rate. Performers are similarly lionised (think of Callas, Gould, Furtwängler…), with lesser mortals continually compared to the greats. Our eagerness to discover the greatest performances (the ‘Building a Library’ choices, if you will) is a regular reminder of this need to situate composers and their works, musicians and their performances, in the Pantheon of the Greats.

An alternative approach would be to talk about music itself – the sounding phenomenon in its various guises, from live performance and recording to the printed or manuscript score – in an intelligent and intelligible way. This is easier said than done. In the Good Old Days, programme notes went into great detail describing a work’s themes and forms, and readers were assumed to be familiar with such concepts as sonata or variation form, exposition, development and recapitulation, first and second subjects, tonic, dominant and relative major keys. How much did this tell them about the music? In rare cases, quite a lot, but usually very little indeed, short of providing a few markers to be ticked off as the performance proceeded.

More recently, the old positivist approach has been replaced by the enthusing commentary, with ever more gushing pronouncements about how amazing or extraordinary this or that work, composer, artist or performance is, until the poor listener goes into sensory overload under a surfeit of adjectives. Much (perhaps too much) depends on how and individual listener or reader responds to the style and personality of a particular commentator, although the latter’s skill in deploying pertinent illustrative examples (if only to give the poor listener a break from the constant flow of superlatives) will also be a factor.

There have, on occasion, been approaches that have tried to avoid verbiage altogether. Hans Keller’s ‘wordless functional analyses’, some of them broadcast in the 1950s and 60s, constituted one such attempt, though Keller’s failure to present a fully supportive methodology meant that this interesting project didn’t get much further, and the analyses he did produce were largely restricted to the established canon of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. More fruitful in terms of range were the graphic analyses of Heinrich Schenker (recently the object of sustained criticism, but still highly influential), yet their score-based idiom, with notation and concepts that often baffle even the musically-literate, and a similar restriction to the canonical composers of the western tonal tradition (overwhelmingly though not exclusively Austro-German), present similar obstacles.

Finding a mode of communication even remotely worthy of the task of discussing music in all its infinite complexity while remaining intelligible is no easy task. Yet this should not stop us trying. To wrest music away from the clutches of music-as-biography (a mere soundtrack to the life of its creators) is a legitimate and still much-needed objective. It requires, on the one hand, a broader contextualisation of the music within its social, cultural, aesthetic, political and religious surroundings, reaching far beyond the limits of a particular composer’s biographical inventory. There is a growing body of work that attempts to address precisely these issues (for example, the excellent Cambridge Companion series), but it remains largely in the academic domain, often aimed at fellow academics (and correspondingly pricey), and is rarely heard through the din of the biographical myth-spinners and gushing enthusiasts.