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 Night‟s 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
 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

Mozart‟s 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

composer‟s, I would like to place alongside the Galvany a recording that tends to produce a

similar reaction, a 1911 disc of Elena Gerhardt singing Schubert‟s 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, You lovely Art: in how many dark hours,

Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt, when life‟s wild tumult surrounded me,

Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden, have you aroused my heart to warmer love,

Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrückt! and transported me to a better world!

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf entflossen, Often a sigh, escaping from your harp,
 3

Ein süsser, heiliger Akkord von dir a sweet, holy chord from you,

Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen, has shown me a heaven of better times;

Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür! 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 tone-

5
colour which have set a standard difficult to approach‟. Yet for John Austin, writing an

Amazon review of a modern reissue in 2000,

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
6
the early twentieth-century generation of singers that I should like young singers of today to hear.

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 people‟s 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

Gerhardt‟s, 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
 6

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 Gerhardt‟s 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
 7

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

Gerhardt‟s performance seems consistent with Watt and Ash‟s 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
 8

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-Taylor‟s 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 music‟s 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 music‟s

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

Music‟s use in coordinating emotions needs a bit more explanation, and this is Cross‟s

most powerful insight. Music‟s 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
 10

with regard to the concepts of existentialism, on the other, that caused audiences to laugh.

And so it is with Gerhardt‟s 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 music‟s 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 peacock‟s 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 Miller‟s 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
 11

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>
 12

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 music‟s 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

music‟s 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 DeNora‟s 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
 13

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 sound‟s likeness to something else, including things
 14

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 Coward‟s phrase about the potency of cheap music has

become a cliché 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,
34
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
 15

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
 16

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 moment‟s 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,
 17

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 one‟s 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

Gerhardt‟s 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 brain‟s 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
 18

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 self-

select? 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 Gerhardt‟s 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 Capell‟s

and Lawrence Kramer‟s 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
 19

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 brain‟s 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 Gerhardt‟s 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 performer‟s 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 performer‟s

fictional (or, who knows, real) subjectivity, subjectivity modelled by sound applied to a score.

The reluctance to do so, to accept and share the performer‟s apparent subjectivity while the

performance lasts, is especially strong for many modern listeners when it comes to the highly

expressive performers of Gerhardt‟s 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

Gerhardt‟s „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

performer‟s 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 „that‟s

not Schubert‟ when really we feel „that‟s not me‟. Or, more probably, that‟s not a me I‟m

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

Gerhardt‟s 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), 10–11. 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), 91–106; 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), 212–38; 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

9
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), 221–9.

11
Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 82–3.
12
Ibid., 81.
13
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, „Portamento and Musical Meaning‟, Journal of Musicological Research,

25 (2006), 233–61.
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, Björn Merker

and Steven Brown (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 271–300. See also Steven Brown, „Contagious

Heterophony: A New Theory about the Origins of Music‟, Musicae scientiae, 11 (2007), 3–26.
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 Roisín L. Ash, „A Psychological Investigation of Meaning in Music‟, Musicae

scientiae, 2 (1998), 33–53.

18
Alvin M. Liberman and Ignatius G. Mattingly, „The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised‟,

Cognition, 21 (1985), 1–36; John Sloboda, „Does Music Mean Anything?‟, Musicae scientiae, 2

(1998), 21–32, repr. in idem, Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function

(Oxford, 2005), 163–72; 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), 309–37; Arnie Cox, „The Mimetic Hypothesis and Embodied Musical Meaning‟,

Musicae scientiae, 5 (2001), 195–212. 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 Asperger‟s 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 Asperger‟s see S. Timothy Maloney, „Glenn

Gould: Autistic Savant‟, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Learner and Joseph N.

Straus (New York, 2006), 121–35.

20
Among many recent studies by Cross see especially „Music and Meaning, Ambiguity and

Evolution‟, Musical Communication, ed. Miell et al., 27–43; „Music and Cognitive Evolution‟, The

Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Robin Dunbar and Louise Barrett (Oxford, 2007),

649–67; and „The Evolutionary Nature of Musical Meaning‟, Musicae scientiae (forthcoming).
21
Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Just the Words, ed. Roger Wilmut, 2 vols. (London, 1989), ii, 53–7.
22
Geoffrey Miller, „Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection‟, The Origins of Music, ed.

Wallin et al., 329–60 (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), 31–56; eadem, „Historical

Perspectives in Music Sociology‟, Poetics, 32 (2004), 211–21 (p. 218).

25
The strongest examples of music‟s 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), 64–82.
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), 87–120; Klaus Scherer, „Vocal Expression of Emotion‟, Handbook of Affective Sciences, ed.

Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer and H. Hill Goldsmith (Oxford, 2003), 433–56; and Patrik

Juslin and Petri Laukka, „Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance:

Different Channels, Same Code?‟, Psychological Bulletin, 129 (2003), 770–814.

27
Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music, esp. chapter 8, paragraphs 101–9.
28
Arthur N. Popper and Richard R. Fay, „Evolution of the Ear and Hearing: Issues and Questions‟,

Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 50 (1997), 213–21.

29
Laurel J. Trainor and Robert J. Zatorre, „The Neurobiological Basis of Musical Expectations‟, The

Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Hallam et al., 171–83.

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), 221–47, and Juslin and Laukka, „Communication of

Emotions‟.
32
Alf Gabrielsson, „Emotions in Strong Experiences with Music‟, Music and Emotion, ed. Juslin and

Sloboda, 431–49.
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., 47–58.

34
The best synthesis of the recent evidence is in Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 62–8.
35
See especially Isabelle Peretz, „Brain Specialization for Music: New Evidence from Congenital

Amusia‟, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, ed. Peretz and Zatorre, 192–203.
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, „Beethoven‟s 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, 22–26

August, 2006), 286–7.

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), 95–9.

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 Leech-

Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music, chapter 7, paragraphs 20–32.

41
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, „Musicology and Performance‟, Music’s Intellectual History: Founders,

Followers and Fads, ed. Zdravko Blažeković (New York, forthcoming). The material on Schubert

song is also to be found in The Changing Sound of Music, chapter 4, paragraphs 21–3 and 37–45.
42
Theodor W. Adorno, „The Mastery of the Maestro‟, Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(Stanford, CA, 1999), 40–53 (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 Schubert‟s Winterreise by Christine Schäfer with Eric Schneider (Onyx Classics,

ONYX 4010, rec. 2003) and by Nathalie Stutzmann with Inger Södergren (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 Kramer‟s essay on Schumann‟s Carnaval in Musical

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

46
Kramer‟s 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.
49
A treasure-trove of negative rhetoric along these lines is reconstructed in Bruce Haynes, The End of

Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music (New York, 2007), esp. chapter 3. Edward Said,

Orientalism (New York, 1978).