Mozart, I learn, spent “the first 22 years of his life
studying with Beethoven”. An
extraordinary fact not least because, while we do not know precisely when
Beethoven was born, the consensus of informed opinion is that he was born
sometime towards the end of 1770, by which time Mozart was 14. Another apparently incontrovertible fact is
that “Scarlatti invented Sonata Form”, which will have come as shock both to A
B Marx, who first codified it almost a century after Scarlatti’s death, as well
as to Scarlatti himself who described his keyboard works as Essercizii. Both statements have appeared in programme
notes written by students to accompany their own recitals. Is this a frightening level of ignorance being
displayed or a terrifying inability to master language? In the case of the first claim, I suspect it
was the latter - this appears to be an attempt to say that Beethoven was 22
when he studied with Mozart - but I cannot begin to fathom what, if any, real
facts might have been the subject of perverted syntax in the second.
It would be amusing to roll out a whole string of such
solecisms presented in programme notes written by students and amateur
musicologists. There’s the statement
that Elgar wrote his Cello Concerto “for Jacqueline Du Pré” (regardless of the 11
years which elapsed between the death of one and the birth of the other) or
that “Beethoven’s brother, Modest, suggested the title of the Pathetic Piano
Sonata”. But it would be pointless and little unfair to highlight
these gaffes; often the programme notes are written under extreme pressure by
students whose own teachers never had to undertake such tasks and are singularly
ill-equipped to teach them. The practice
of requiring a student to write their own programme notes for recitals
presented for diplomas or as graduation exercises is a very recent phenomenon,
and perhaps we should excuse those who find it a task beyond their skill.
The thinking behind getting student performers to do this is
admirable. Not only does it remove the
awful pressure that was once put on them by the post-recital viva voce - how to concentrate on a
performance when, at the back of the mind you are rehearsing what to say to the
examiner? - but it encourages performers to look beyond the mere mechanics of
playing the pieces and delve, albeit at a superficial level, into the
background of the music they are playing. There is also the opportunity here
for an alert performer to justify or at least explain the rationale of an
interpretation. Some established performers
do this magnificently – Stephen Hough, Angela Hewitt, Benjamin Zander spring to
mind – but I have yet to encounter the student who uses programme notes for
this purpose. Far more usual is the
regurgitation of notes from other sources offering not only no personal insight
into the performance but often clearly addressing a performance by someone
else; how tired I am of reading that the second movement of Haydn’s Sonata in E
flat is “marked Adagio Cantabile”,
only to hear it performed presto e
stacatissimo.
In practice, though, student programme notes hardly ever
provide anything of value, and as often as not imply a level of ignorance which
positively undermines faith in the player’s interpretative instincts. The reason for this is that effective
programme notes require a degree of perceptiveness which can only be
accumulated through long experience in listening to music. Hence the long-standing convention of getting
a world-weary hack (like myself) to pen them; while the performer is busily
preparing the interpretations (so the argument goes), people like me can while
away their dismal lives cloistered in libraries checking facts and unearthing
insignificant anecdotes. The result: an
audience primed to be receptive to the performer’s interpretation by carefully
crafted programme notes, putting the music and the performance in some kind of
coherent context. On top of that, those
of us who have been in the programme-note writing game for years have built up
a fund of peripheral and generally useless information about a whole range of
musical works which can be used to keep concert-goers in thrall when they have
a dull moment between the interval drinks and the musical presentations.
Given the lack of both listening and writing experience
which is an inevitable consequence of being a performer at the very start of a
musical career, is it little wonder that these programme notes offer such scant
value? At the bottom of it all is the
ready availability and easy accessibility of the kind of information previously
only open to those who had both the time and the inclination to root it
out. Students, with a performing
technique to hone, were traditionally regarded as too busy to spend their time
up to their necks in dusty tomes in secluded libraries; and the fact that to
derive any benefit at all from a library you needed some training and a great
deal of trial-and-error experience, made the task of preparing programme notes
an impossibility for them. Now that
anyone can find out anything with a couple of well-intentioned keystrokes, has
suddenly made the acquisition of facts so much easier and so much quicker. So those who devise syllabuses for students,
feel that writing their own notes is no longer the herculean task it once
was. And, given that it’s inconceivable
that any of us could work without the benefit of online resources today, that
logic seems unquestionable.
The vast amount of information available to users of the
internet is certainly a Godsend to programme note writers, but it is also the
principal cause of the appalling gaffes we read. While books go through the many filters of
editors, proof-readers and peer reviewers, any old Tom, Dick, Harry or Dr Marc
can publish whatever they like on the internet. The fact that it is there does not make it
true. I advise my students that if an
internet site about music is free, it is unlikely to be a reliable source of
correct information. But there again,
even the legitimate, pay-for-access sites have to be handled with care; inexperienced
surfers are just as likely to make fools of themselves by misreading the
information given on these. Take the
young clerk in the office of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra who, having
been shown how to access Grove Online, decided
she did not need to refer to an expert in the office before sending out the
publicity she was charged with preparing.
Thus we had the billing for “Beethoven’s Second Violin Concerto” and the
promise of “Music by two great Hungarian composers, Liszt and Mahler”. True, Grove
does refer to an earlier violin concerto by Beethoven and an association
between Hungary and Mahler, but anyone with an iota of musical knowledge will
know that these “facts” are not as clear-cut as they might seem to the
uninformed reader.
This explains how so many false facts manage to find their
way into student programme notes. But
what causes that mangling of syntax which in turn leads to the words saying something
totally different to the thoughts? This
may be simply down to poor command of language, but there’s another, perhaps
more sinister, reason: The Spectre of Plagiarism.
The very accessibility of internet resources led to the
widespread practice of cutting huge swathes from one article and pasting them
into another. Apparently, university students
in the US had this off to a fine art; passing off the work of other, often
anonymous, writers as their own. Pretty
quickly the authorities stamped down on it and issued dire threats against
those caught out. They even devised an
ingenious computer program which compares a student’s work with a few million online
articles to test for plagiarism. As with
so much that originates in the US, pretty quickly the rest of the educational
world began to fear plagiarism as if it was some kind of plague, and now few
students can begin any work without a stern admonition that “Plagiarism is
ILLEGAL” and threatening all manner of retribution on the perpetrators.
Nobody in their right minds looks to programme notes to provide
original research. The best examples
simply gather together other people’s ideas in order to provide a broader
picture of the work in question. As a
programme note writer I am much more of a cherry picker than I am a seed-sower;
and I’m proud of being able to select and collate relevant material from a wide
spectrum of sources. I cannot imagine
anyone seriously reading programme notes and not imagining the writer has
rifled through a whole host of other writings to arrive at the facts and comments
printed in the programme books. But how can
young students, terrified beyond measure of having the charge of plagiarism
levelled against them, begin to take ideas from other sources without risking
their whole academic futures? The
obvious answer is that they are so careful to avoid the wording of their
sources, that they change the words so dramatically that the whole meaning gets
lost.
So we end up with amazing distortions of the truth such as, “Britten’s
sham marriage ended in 1976” – which is clearly an attempt to rephrase this
published comment; “Britten and Peter Pears lived as husband and wife until
Britten’s death”. And I’m not at all
sure that the recent trend amongst student programme note writers to list the
works of Bach not with the letters BWV but with BMW is not an over-zealous
attempt to avoid a charge of plagiarism. (Which raises the intriguing question;
is a BMW 5 series a kind of car driven by successful drug dealers and
unscrupulous businessmen or a non-chorale-based organ work by Bach?) There again, that may be down to the vagaries
of a computer spell-check, which is quite often the only editing that the
writers of these programme notes undertake.
There really is no need for those who write these to worry
about plagiarism. Most of the facts that
are ever needed are widely in the public domain, and if the writer comes across
a particularly pithy phrase which they would dearly love to use or a published statement
which seems to stretch the bounds of credulity, all they have to do is acknowledge
it. Far better to write; “As Pauline
Yore-Legge suggested in her book about the composer, ‘He wrote his first music
when he was one year old and continued to de-compose long after his death’”,
than to risk public ridicule or worse by pretending you are the instigator of
such appalling rubbish.
Really interesting, and quite informative as well... made for entertaining reading.... :)
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