Transcript of Mark Lindley’s Interview with Tonkünstler-on-the-Bund

Tonkünstler-on-the-Bund: What are the aims of your musicology? Do you see what you are doing as fundamentally different from, say, Bach studying the manuscripts of other composers?

Professor Mark Lindley: I imagine that Bach’s reason for studying the music of other composers was to get insights for his own composing. I study compositions in order to understand better why I like some of them more than others, in order to gain insights as to how they could best be performed, and for the sheer fun of studying them. (I don’t expect to compose music of any complexity. I improvise a few tunes for fun.)

TKB: Was this your view all along? If not, could you tell me about its evolution over the years and the influences that helped shape it?

Mr Lindley: In my teens and until I was in my mid-20s, I hoped to become a professional composer. After that hope faded – and likewise my hope of becoming a professional harpsichordist – I was a professor of musicology and music-theory, and as such I tried to be a good teacher to my pupils, partly by sharing with them my insights about various compositions. (I had some success with that teaching.)

One way of summarizing this is to say that I have loved music even though music hasn’t, alas, loved me back. I had the luxury of cultivating the romance because my father (who earned a good salary as a Newsweek editor and columnist) made a generous bargain with me when I was about to graduate from secondary school: he said that if I would get a liberal-arts college degree, he would pay for that and then also for me to pursue graduate studies in music. (So I went to Harvard College.)

TKB: Every extramural DPhil is unique. What are the dynamics leading up to your own?

Mr Lindley: This was at Columbia University. One of the musicology professors took a hostile attitude toward me (for no good reason) and told me, “Just remember, I will be on the committee” deciding whether to award the degree. So I decided (1) to go the extra-mural route and (2) to wait (before submitting my refereed publications) until it seemed clear to me that my overall musicological achievement was greater than his. This strategy succeeded (though at the cost of limiting my ability to get paid academic work in the meantime). When I submitted my publications, the hostile professor, contrary to what he had told me, declined to sit on the committee. Instead of him there was a smarter and more prestigious young professor, Richard Taruskin, who, at the outset of the meeting, set the tone by declaring that my work on historical performance-practices had had a notable influence on modern performance of “early music”.

TKB: Given a particular subject, how do you decide whether to write a paper or a book?

Mr Lindley: If it seems that what I have to say publicly about the subject can be treated adequately in a paper, then I don’t try to work up a book about it. (An example is my article on what Marx and Engels said about music; I think a typical German musicologist would have thrashed out a book on it.)

TKB: Could you tell me about the most memorable editors you have worked with?

Mr Lindley: Stanley Sadie, the chief editor in the 1970s of the 20-volume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), was very personable, smart, and adroit as a writer. He could be fooled, by adroit writing in another person’s text, into regarding it as well-researched.

He was mainly a music-critic (for The Times of London) and, like some other members of that profession, didn’t have a very good ear. One evening he took me as a guest to a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. We sat next to each other and chatted during the intermissions. Wotan’s opening line in that opera is a brief magisterial exclamation delivered from offstage. There’s a general taboo against the use of microphones in traditional opera performances, but in this performance the taboo was discarded (for less than a minute) by having Wotan’s exclamation amplified with notable reverberation in several loudspeakers all over the auditorium; this conveyed very effectively the notion of Wotan as the king of all the gods. During an intermission Stanley commented to me that that singer had sung his first line with a remarkably powerful voice. Meanwhile there had been, in the prelude to one of the acts, a moment when a trombonist had played an unsuitably blaring note – not out of tune, but just much louder than it ought to have been – and I wrinkled my nose in distaste. Immediately after the performance, Stanley dictated via telephone his review of it to The Times, and upon reading it the next day I found that he criticized the trombonists for playing “out of tune” in that prelude. He had presumed that since I was an expert on nuances of tuning, my displeasure must have meant that the trombone had been out of tune.

Let me complement this story about him with an account of another, equally unforgettable experience that I had while employed in London at New Grove. It was during a party that the publisher gave when it decided to dispense with the Americans on the staff (we had been hired because of our musicological savvy) and to have a team of linguistically superior Brits complete the editing. The party was presided over by the owner of the firm, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He was in his 80s and his face was grey as he hadn’t shaved for a week or so. He gave a witty speech and then sat in a corner while the staff were brought – two at a time, one Brit and one Yank, one male and one female – to have a friendly but very brief personal chat with him. My turn was shared with a lady who was in charge of defining “house style” for the Grove project. At the outset I mentioned to Sir Harold that my father had had occasion to interview him more than once now and then during his service as prime minister. Sir Harold seemed to recall this, but his response was so quick that I wasn’t quite sure that he really did recall it; I thought he might just be glad-handing. However, he then started talking sentimentally to me about the fact that his mother had been American. After going on for a good 15 minutes in that vein he said he would like to visit the USA once more (before dying), “to see the new cities, like Minneapolis and Dallas”. I said, “Yes – no point in visiting New York again. It has all the same problems as London, only more intensively.” He looked sharply at me, scratched his beard, and said, “‘More intensively’, eh?!” I blushed; I knew what he meant: I had used a fussy and pompous phrase, “more intensively”, instead of a good short word, “worse”. It was a great lesson in good English. He saw the blush and kindly went on talking sweetly to me for a few more minutes; he was a great politician.

TKB: You have been more peripatetic than most academics. What are the limitations you see of staying put at a single institution on one’s intellectual horizons and pedagogy?

Mr Lindley: Academic institutions are most often based in one country only. I imagine that even under modern conditions of electronic communication, to stay at one school could cause one’s view of worldwide problems to be skewed to the perspectives of its home-country.

TKB: Did Bach nod? What are the most prominent passages where you think a composer was playing the Brotmusiker and not giving his very best?

Mr Lindley: I think Bach when composing would always try diligently to make the music serve its intended purpose(s) as well as possible. He was deeply religious and I think that composing each of his more than 200 cantatas was a sincere exercise in praise. However, some of his religious compositions had important additional purposes (besides praise) and he proceeded accordingly. An example is his two-hour-long Mass in B minor (BWV 232; I regard it as a D-major composition with its first movement in the relative minor), which was described by its 19th-century publisher as “the greatest musical work of all times and [all] peoples.” Bach clearly wanted it, with its text in Greek and Latin rather than in German (the normal language for Lutheran liturgy), to win patronage from Roman Catholic monarchs; also, since his general education had been quasi-medieval, he may have regarded Latin as a worldwide language (he may even have been unaware of the existence of China and India) and so his setting of this Latin text may have been tantamount, for him, to a quasi-Humanist gesture of reaching out beyond social divisions due to religious cults – a purpose justifying an extraordinary compositional effort.

Vivaldi and Telemann come to mind as composers who became Brotmusiker at certain times. Many years ago I listened to recordings of a couple hundred of Vivaldi’s concertos and felt that the weakest were some of the violin concertos in which he himself would have been the soloist in his auditorium for tourists in Venice; I think he may have felt that his own flashy playing could compensate for the compositional mediocrity of those concertos, whereas he would take more care when composing concertos in which his protégées would be the soloists (in concertos for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, mandolin, etc.) or when composing for publication. As for Telemann, whom Bach respected highly and chose to be the godfather of his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, and yet who is widely regarded as having written a vast number of weak compositions, I think a complicating factor is that Telemann probably agreed with his friend Johann Adolf Scheibe’s aesthetic judgement that the polyphonic texture of many of Bach’s compositions was so complicated as to render the music “obscure” and unnatural. I think Telemann wanted his music to convey, like good journalistic prose, its entire meaning immediately on first hearing, whereas Bach’s compositions reward repeated hearings with deeper delights.

I think it is a sign of the times that some of Vivaldi’s and Telemann’s compositions are getting warmer reception in the 21st century than any of them did in the 19th. In our overly complex and troubled conditions, a lot of us crave for simplicities in our music more than for complexities.

Richard Strauss was a gifted late-Romantic composer who I think sometimes worked sloppily for the sake of efficiency in churning out his music. It seems to me that he would, for instance, occasionally improvise a modulation by shifting from a somehow hovering chord in one key to a gentle and lusciously orchestrated tonic six-four chord in another key and presuming that the shift would “work” even though he hadn’t really “heard” whether the harmonic logic would be 100% convincing; 60% would suffice.

TKB: You mentioned to me yesterday the sources of the emotions expressed by Bach. Is his music necessarily constrained by the historical circumstances he lived in?

Mr Lindley: An interesting question! I think the range is very broad but nevertheless limited. If you reflect in detail on the fact that most of the emotions expressed in the music Mozart composed for most of the arias etc. of the characters in his great operas, you can readily see how much the range of emotions expressed in Bach’s music is limited. Bach’s range includes (1) all the Christian religious sentiments (he was a thoroughly religious person; I think that even when dancing he would never momentarily forget that he was a Christian; there is thus a nice paradox re: his sarabandes since that kind of dance had originally been, according to a missionary who had witnessed sarabandes in Latin America, such as to “excite bad emotions in even very decent people”), and then also (2) all the sentiments that a loving father feels for his children (I sense tenderness even in the simplest of his little teaching-pieces), and yet also (3) the grand sentiments of royal and quasi-royal civic pomp. This latter aspect of his expressiveness is lost when his music is performed too fast, as is often done nowadays….

TKB: Do you recall hearing any organist who reminded you of what was said of Bach’s registration, ‘Diese Wissenschaften sind mit ihm abgestorben’?

Mr Lindley: No. As a teenager I was fascinated with registrations, but after studying harpsichord I became more interested in how best to articulate the melodic lines.

TKB: You mentioned listening to a couple hundred compositions of Vivaldi’s. A German musician went through 24 records of a concerto to arrive at his interpretation of one phrase. Does the mediation of gramophones distort the experience of reading music as it was practised in the past?

Mr Lindley: Listening to other musicians’ performances of a piece that one is learning to play is bound to affect one’s concept of how to perform it. During my years of trying to become a professional harpsichordist, I liked the fact that there were few or no recordings of most of the repertoire of early keyboard music (for organ, harpsichord or clavichord) that was available in musicological editions such as the Corpus of Early Keyboard Music series published by the American Institute of Musicology. I had the fun of sorting out “from scratch”, as it were, how to play a lot of those pieces. This fostered my interest in historical performance practices.

TKB: Is access to a composer’s complete oeuvre a blessing? Could it be that the necessarily selective copying in a manuscript culture performed a valuable service in weeding out trivial works?

Mr Lindley: I would like the question better it if referred to “third-rate” works instead of to “trivial” ones. I am grateful to the professional composers and the homespun folk-song singers who created and refined the dozens of compositionally trivial songs that I sang on 1001 evenings to make my daughter’s bedtime happy – songs like “Old McDonald Had a Farm” (she would choose the animals and then remember the order in which she had chosen them on that evening), and “Il était un petit navire” and “Hänschen klein” (destined to become foreign-language lessons), and “Goodnight, Ladies”, to which she would nod off as I sang it again and again diminuendo.

I agree that a vast amount of trivial music other than songs has been composed, but I would note that posterity has occasionally assessed a fairly elaborate composition more highly than the composer himself had done – for instance, some of Beethoven’s WoO (Werke-ohne-Opuszahl, i.e. works-without-opus-number) pieces, including his sets of piano-variations on melodies from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

TKB: Melody makes the composer. Before the age of publicity machines, the most successful composers are those who were melodically inventive but stayed within the bounds of what was agreeable to non-connoisseurs in terms of musical form, e.g. Telemann, Graupner. Historians have by and large focussed on the formal history of music because melodies are much less susceptible to useful analysis. What’s your reaction to this narrative?

Mr Lindley: When teaching music-appreciation courses to college students who were likely to listen to recordings of classical music and maybe even attend concerts, I would concentrate during the first couple of weeks on how to hear some kind of combination of things happening in the music at each moment, and then in the last weeks I would discuss various musical forms (strophic, theme-and-variations, continual with a repeating bass-line or chord-pattern, ternary form (ABA, and its sibling AABA’), rondo, ritornello, binary form, rounded binary, sonata form, and sonata-rondo). When teaching post-grad musicological courses on the history (until ca 1950) of classical Western composition, I focused primarily on important genres and on the work of some composers who contributed to their development. For review at the end of the course I prepared a set of slides the last of which is reproduced here. (The date “1900” is a rough chronological reference point.)

(I think very few 21st-century classical-music composers are contributing to some of the genres listed in this slide.)

While I agree with you that melodic lines are vital and that it’s hard to explain the many ways in which they can be good or bad, it seems to me that a modicum of competence re: rhythm, harmony, Klangfarbenmelodie and form is also vital. One of Randall Thompson’s precepts for choral music was that if the singers enjoy singing it, the audience will enjoy listening to it….

TKB: Given the primacy of melody, is it fair to say that the social function of fugue or sonata form was to allow people who had no musical ideas – what Brahms called ‘einfache und achttaktige Melodien’ – but were good at formal analysis (e.g. Sechter) to still make a living as a composer?

Mr Lindley: I admit that in my own case, a psychological function of learning (at Harvard) how to write fugues was to convince myself that I could become a professional composer. The course taught me that a fugue-subject ought to be susceptible to certain kinds of contrapuntal manipulation which Bach was brilliant at recognizing immediately upon hearing any fugue-subject (he would nudge his son and whisper to him what the composer was going to do with it). However, I think that many fugue subjects are nonetheless beautiful melodically, and that an important social function of fugues has been to give us an opportunity to listen to polyphonic discourse in a particularly concentrated way.

It seems to me that (1) lots of sonata-form pieces are melodically interesting – including, for instance, the first movements of the symphonies which Bizet, Prokofiev and Shostakovich composed in order to graduate from the conservatories that gave them their academic training, and (2) the composers who created sonata form (I am thinking of Emanuel Bach, Platti, and Joseph Haydn) had plenty of good musical ideas.

I agree that Sechter’s music is academic and very dull. However, I think his teaching won more respect and money than his compositions did (whereas it was the other way around for his disciple Bruckner).

TKB: A strong disincentive to write music today is knowing how easily a piece can end up being commoditised. One shudders, too, at the prospect of one’s music being played endlessly in inappropriate contexts five hundred years from now. How about a return to the Sistine way and a ban on recording music?

Mr Lindley: Your reference to the Sistine Chapel suggests to me that you regard a modern ban on tourists making audio recordings there as a continuation of an earlier ban on writing down in musical notation a distinctively embellished version of one particular composition that was performed there. I think lots of performance venues have the same kind of modern ban on audio recordings without any historical context of a ban centuries ago on transcriptions into musical notation.

A friend of mine who knows many strange facts about the history of Western music has told me that the People’s Republic of China staged in Beijing in the 1950s a grand performance, celebrating Mao’s birthday and calling for world peace, of the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne composed by Händel in 1713 to celebrate her birthday and a peace treaty intended to settle the War of the Spanish Succession in a way favorable to England. However, I believe (pardon me for saying so) that it would be more sensible to worry about what truly horrible things may happen a few months or years from now than about the contexts in which your compositions might be performed in the 26th century.

One of Charles Ives’s feelings about his compositions was that he didn’t want them to be copyrighted. In 1920 and 1921 he sent hundreds of copies of a piano sonata that he had composed, together with a book entitled “Essays Before a Sonata”, to musicians, critics, and libraries here and there in the USA. (I do likewise with each of my digitally available publications. In a postscript to each such message I say, “If you would prefer not to get such messages from me, send an empty reply to this present one.” Three people have done so in ten years.)

I wish that you had asked me (in this interview) to say what are some of my favorite symphonies, and why. I would have seized the opportunity to sketch an historical overview of this genre which is now obsolete as far as composers are concerned but still hanging on performance-wise. I would have said that I enjoy hearing competently composed symphonies that aren’t my favorites, but that my favorite three symphonies now in my ripe years are Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 9th and Prokofiev’s 7th. I like the nonviolent character of Beethoven’s 6th symphony (the “Pastoral,” in which a thunderstorm is depicted as harmless) and I especially like the spiritual growth from private to public emotions in the latter half of the work: the 1st movement depicts Beethoven’s feeling of joy upon arriving for a rural vacation from big-city life; the 2nd movement depicts his personal feeling of serenity as he walks along the quiet stream far from urban bustle; the 3rd movement depicts the communal joy of a pastoral village as the peasants dance to celebrate their successful agricultural collaborations, and then the Finale expresses universal human gratitude for the bounties of Nature.

I admire, as everyone does, the densely integrated construction of Beethoven’s 5th symphony (which I regard as a C-major work about a violent war against a dark enemy), and yet I regard his 7th as an even more tightly constructed example of polyphonic Tonkunst: throughout the first three movements, F competes with F sharp to serve as the upper neighbor-note to E, and there is (according to my analysis of the work) a single Schenkerian Urlinie for the entire work as the 2nd movement prolongs E and the 3rd movement dwells on F. I could with pleasure teach a one-semester college-level course on Beethoven’s nine symphonies. It would provide historical background information and would trace in detail how his way of putting together such a work of polyphonic Tonkunst evolved.

Apropos Schubert’s 9th Symphony (the “Great”) I would have mentioned that a friend of mine used to say, “You don’t really love Schubert if you don’t think that symphony is too short.” (I feel the same way, mutatis mutandis, about Tchaikovsky’s 4th because of all its beautiful themes and motifs, but I regard his 6th as superior in construction and deeply expressive of his personal feelings about his forthcoming suicide.)

Among Prokofiev’s symphonies I like best the 7th, and not just for its grand melodies and gentleness – he wrote it for youngsters to enjoy hearing – but also because I feel that the emotions which it expresses are not just about his own life but are also public emotions about the future of Soviet Russian society and of humankind.) I think that while most of Shostakovich’s symphonies seem to express public emotions, there is an underlying intention to express personal bitterness, and indeed, documentary evidence suggests that (1) the end of his 5th symphony, while apparently depicting a public sentiment of joyful triumph, really depicts that people in the USSR had to pretend to share in such a public sentiment because they knew that the Party’s censor would punish them if they didn’t, and (2) the censor of Shostakovich’s work privately understood this double entendre while publicly approving of that symphony.

I would never choose to hear Bruckner’s symphonies; I wouldn’t even describe them as well composed, because his featuring, in the Expositions of the movements in sonata form, of two big alternative keys (rather than just one) to the home key, means that there’s so much quasi-Developmental music already within the Exposition that the overall shape of the movement is obscured, and I can’t meanwhile recognize the home key as such. I can understand why someone with an excess of free time might like them because they are rich in melody, harmony and rhythm without becoming very gripping emotionally (in my humble opinion). Please pardon me for rambling on and on, I am old.

TKB: We have a mind to create a comprehensive bibliography, arranging chronologically your works in musicology and economics in parallel columns and linking them to academia.edu copies where available. I was wondering if you have a list of the titles of all your publications.

Mr Lindley: I don’t have such a list. One reason why is that while I have tried to publish texts that would be likely to remain valid for twenty years,¹See independent.academia.edu/MarkLindley2 and uohyd.academia.edu/MarkLindley.—Ed. I have sometimes withdrawn those which had become obsolete. Some fairly recent publications by me that are now inaccessible (even to me) had been posted on the Internet by Mahatma Gandhi Mission University during my residence there but have meanwhile been allegedly lost in the shuffle during a revamp of its method of posting things. The University has promised several times to restore them but hasn’t done it. This may well be due to an assessment by the vice-chancellor that he would implicitly be discredited by the publications which the University had posted describing and praising my proposed program in ecological economics.