Shadows of meaning: Webern’s Piano Variations on record
The history of music is traditionally written in the form of the history of compositions, yet it is in the form of performance that music enters most people’s experience and becomes meaningful. This project attempts to sketch a history of musical modernism as embodied in recorded performances of a single, emblematic work, Webern’s Piano Variations Op 27. Webern composed Op 27 in 1935-6, and envisaged its performance in terms of the hyper-expressive style characteristic of pre-war Viennese modernism, but a performance tradition became established only in the context of the post-war avant-garde centred on Darmstadt. The music was now seen in terms of a quite different conception of modernism, in which values of emotional expression gave way to those of structural complexity and integrity: performers treated Op 27 as a kind of sacred text, to be reproduced in performance in much the same sense as a religious ritual. By the 1970s, however, post-war modernism was itself giving way to a new, more interpretive approach that can equally be characterised as more historically informed or as tending towards postmodernism. My purpose is to examine in detail how this broad narrative of aesthetic change is inscribed in recordings of Op 27, and to show how empirical analysis of recordings can give rise to nuanced understandings of the many shades which modernism has taken in music.
Based on a complete collection of commercial recordings of Op 27 and involving collaboration with Craig Sapp (Stanford University), this research will build on computational methods for the analysis of recordings originally developed at the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). It will seek to show how quantitative methods can be brought to bear on the issues of cultural change and meaning with which musicologists are centrally concerned. In addition to setting out the changing performance tradition of Op 27 and its relationship to other expressions of modernism, this will involve teasing apart aspects of composition and of performance that are frequently conflated. Music theorists have traditionally adopted a ‘page-to-stage’ approach, evaluating performances in terms of how they underline or bring out compositional structure. But this has never been a primary concern for performers of Op 27. While the work is well known as an unusually rigorous application of the methods of serialism, comparison with recordings of Brahms’s Intermezzo Op 116 No 5 (to which Op 27 bears some striking resemblances) will allow me to assess how far even the literalist performers of the Darmstadt era drew on rhetorical and expressive conventions derived from the performance of tonal music. My working hypothesis is that compositional structure and performance style are not as directly linked as music theorists have believed, and that it is in the space between them that performers exercise their creative agency.
While important theoretical and methodological issues of the study of music as performance are thus at stake, it is also my intention to do justice to the richness and variety of individual interpretive approaches that Op. 27 has afforded. The collection of 67 recordings of Op. 27 on which the project is based includes seven by the idiosyncratic and charismatic Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, of which two were made for televison. I will chart his interpretation of Op 27 across these recordings, investigating ways in which his performances relate to his extensive verbal commentaries on Webern and Op. 27, and how far his playing was moulded by physical aspects of his engagement with the keyboard. I hope the result will be a multi-faceted study of the engagement between an emblematic performer and an emblematic work which does justice to cultural context, agency, and creativity.