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Reviews: Arnold Schönberg Center, Britten Thematic Catalog, and John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive

2014; University of California Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2014.67.3.866

1547-3848

Joseph Auner,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

My goal here is to survey the ways in which archival materials are being made available online for three composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, and John Cage. These three may seem an unlikely trio; indeed their works, ideas, and their relationships to the past and to their audiences represent very different trajectories in twentieth-century music. But one thing they all shared was a profound and lifelong interest in preserving their sketches and manuscripts, correspondence, writings, libraries, and much of the minutiae of their creative and personal lives. Their own collections—subsequently sustained and developed through the efforts of their families, partners, and colleagues—became the basis for the archives now housed at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, and the major Cage holdings in several libraries, including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. While no doubt the three composers had different reasons for preserving so much, they all seemed to have had a pronounced self-consciousness about their roles as composers. I have written elsewhere about how Schoenberg's sense of someone always looking over his shoulder as he worked could be seen as setting the stage for the fully equipped replica of his Brentwood studio we can now observe in Vienna.1 But in the same way, a visitor to Britten's Red House can also examine a restoration of his carefully designed composing room. And of special relevance to the topic at hand, the John Cage Trust has recently released a 4'33" app that allows listeners anywhere to eavesdrop on the sounds of Cage's New York apartment.2While we can only speculate which of the three would have been the most likely to maintain a webpage or Twitter feed about their works and working methods, we can observe the dramatic impact of the Internet on how their archives are being made accessible to the world. The Schönberg Center has had a robust web presence since its founding in 1998.3 The NYPL's John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive was launched in 2012 as part of the composer's centenary celebrations.4 Britten's thematic catalog, along with the redevelopment of the archive and library at The Red House, was made available to coincide with his centennial in 2013.5These remarkable resources for research and teaching represent quite different models for how websites and interfaces can be designed, reflecting the particular nature of each composer's Nachlaß as well as their contrasting creative personae. These sites illustrate how digital tools for organizing and searching massive amounts of data can provide different ways to approach familiar problems as well as new research methodologies and paths of inquiry. This in turn points to the increasingly crucial interactions among archivists, librarians, web designers, and programmers in shaping how information of every sort can be organized and presented.6 Just as important, with their emphasis on accessibility and new forms of interactivity facilitated by the online environment, the three websites show what can be achieved by expanding the possibilities of a truly public "public musicology."Given Schoenberg's long life, the experience of two world wars, and his many addresses in Vienna, Berlin, Boston, and Los Angeles, it is astonishing how much he managed to preserve. After he moved to Berlin in the fall of 1911 he wrote to Alban Berg:The Center's website offers a portal into Schoenberg's personal Nachlaß, as well as a great deal of material that is held in other collections, in particular the large body of letters that Schoenberg donated to the Library of Congress in 1951.8 In addition to the archive and a large research library, the Center includes a gallery with changing expositions (documented on the webpage with videos and photos), a performance hall with an active series of concerts and masterclasses (many of which are also streamed live), and a shop that makes available an extensive selection of scores, recordings, books, and journals, including the Center's own publications, such as the Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center and an extensive Catalogue raisonné of Schoenberg's paintings and drawings.9Combatting the common image of Schoenberg as a lonely and misunderstood prophet—an image that he himself sometimes embraced—it is noteworthy that the Center's home page includes a wide range of materials intended for the general public, much of which is accessible in both German and English. A biographical timeline includes a link for each work with background information, details on the performance and publication history, a discography, and a streaming recording. There are also links to a database of more than 3,500 photographs, Schoenberg's paintings, and other multimedia materials posted on the Center's YouTube channel. Introductions to Schoenberg's music, thought, and influence are provided through a collection of interviews he conducted throughout his life, along with short writings about him by other composers and artists from Wassily Kandinsky to Daniel Liebeskind. Further resources for the reception of his music can be found in a collection of more than 500 concert reviews.One of the most innovative features of the website is a virtual topography, accessible on a computer or mobile device, that maps photos, films, and documents on to the globe, making it possible to trace where Schoenberg lived and traveled, along with his vast network of relationships around the world. This complements the massive database of correspondence, which numbers more than 20,000 letters to and from Schoenberg, all represented by scans and transcriptions. Many Schoenberg letters have been published, and a multivolume set of the complete correspondence of the Second Viennese School is underway. But the ability to search the entire database online, using many terms such as to/from, date, address, and any word that appears in the text, obviously makes this a powerful resource.Throughout his life Schoenberg expended enormous energies explaining his music in print, lectures, and through the radio. It is thus fitting that so much of the material he preserved and cataloged is now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection. The text manuscript section includes around 12,000 pages, which include published and unpublished writings and lectures on a vast range of topics. As with his correspondence, while many of his unpublished writings have been made available and a critical edition of Schoenberg's complete writings is now underway at the Center, the online environment facilities quick searches for terms and names as well as an exploration of Schoenberg's often extensive revisions to his writings as his ideas developed and changed over the years.Of central importance are the more than 8,000 pages of sketches, drafts, and fair copies relating to his published and unpublished compositions. This includes a large number of fragmentary works, several of which, like the Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra, Die Jakobsleiter, and Moses und Aron have assumed important places in Schoenberg's oeuvre. The musical works can be searched chronologically, by genre, instrumentation, date of publication, and many other factors such as the type of paper. It is also possible to browse through his several large sketchbooks, which each contain material for multiple works.The kinds of sources available vary considerably depending on the size of the work, when he wrote it, the use of a text, and other factors. Records for each item are based on the format of the critical edition of Schoenberg's music, which now includes seventy-one volumes published since 1969.10 As a result, these sections are somewhat less immediately user-friendly, especially for the non-German speaker, but with a quick tutorial on terminology undergraduate students have no trouble navigating the interface. The listing of sources for the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (Fig. 1), gives a sense of the extent of materials available for many works, documenting every stage of the creative process, the publication, and in this case the early performance history with Schoenberg's 1931 radio lecture on the work (a recording of which is available under "Voice Recordings"). Clicking on "Skizzen," for example, brings you to a page that gives the option of working with high resolution scans using a convenient interface online, or downloading the documents to your own computer. Scans of first drafts and fair copies are available in the same way. The website includes information on requesting permission to reproduce archival and published materials; it is also possible for researchers to embed links in their texts that will take readers directly to individual sources.11In light of how much is available online, it is important to remember that even the best scans do not capture all information of potential importance, as well as the fact that significant sources, such as Schoenberg's annotated "Handexemplare" of the printed scores, are generally not scanned. There are also sources that resist representation in the virtual environment, such as Schoenberg's various row devices—including slide rules, information wheels, and cut-out templates designed to be used together with row tables—that can be understood only through physical manipulation. Exploring Schoenberg's extensive marginal notes in the books and journals in his library also requires a trip to Vienna; though there are very helpful lists available online of which sources feature annotations.The Britten-Pears archive holds similarly rich resources, thanks to what the Director of Music Colin Matthews, describes as Britten's trait as an "inveterate hoarder," "keeping not just all of his early manuscripts—perhaps as much out of nostalgia as for any musical reason—but also everyday things such as cheque stubs, bills, and receipts. He was reluctant to throw anything away, useful or not; he was still using his old school exercise books at the end of his life."12In addition to approximately 98% of his music manuscripts, it includes other compositional materials such as libretto drafts, designs for costume and staging, photographs, reviews, Britten and Pears' library of books and scores, and papers pertaining to the Aldeburgh Festival, the English Opera Group, and other organizations. The collection has already served as the basis for large-scale publication projects including Britten's selected correspondence and his diaries.13 At this point the photograph collection, the work's list, and the Thematic Catalog are the most developed online resources, but the webpage includes detailed catalogs of the full research collections, and there are plans to make more manuscripts, letters, and other sources available.14Reflecting Britten's commitment throughout his life to composing for many different audiences, and always with a keen interest in a work's function, venue, and performers, the Britten-Pears website has a welcoming home page.15 There are links to introductions to Britten's music, his relationship to Peter Pears, the importance of the Aldeburgh environment for his music, and an interactive timeline of his life and career. A particularly innovative resource for the general public is an Audio Sampler that allows users to listen to pieces selected on the basis of genre, instrumentation, date, as well as by "mood," chosen from terms in a word cloud, such as "Flowing, Passionate, Playful, Stirring, Gentle." There are also links to Teaching Resources concerning Britten's life and music, with downloadable items targeted for pupils in various age groups; they have also made available an interactive app for children based on The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.The section on "Britten's Music" will be of great value to both beginning and advanced students of Britten's music, providing basic information about each of his compositions, with catalog information, and links to documentary materials such as a recording of a 1983 discussion with Myfanwy Piper about the creative process of The Turn of the Screw, a beautifully animated scan of a notebook Britten kept while composing the War Requiem, and a newsreel from 1945 about the upcoming premiere of Peter Grimes.The Thematic Catalog, builds on several earlier catalogs, including lists that Britten compiled at various points in his life. But it has been designed from the start to take advantage of the online environment, with every page able to be individually searched and cited. Each listing includes basic information about the work and its composition, a description of manuscript sources, and the first performance. Of special value, the listings include a substantial score incipit, each of which will eventually be paired with a recording. In the case of works that have been professionally recorded, an excerpt corresponding to the score is provided. For all the rest, the archive has developed "The Incipit Recording Project," a clear illustration of the interactive possibilities of the online environment that is also so important to the John Cage Living Archive. In addition to an open call for submissions on the webpage, they have facilitated recording sessions with local and far-flung music schools and university departments.16The catalog includes nearly 1,200 works, a striking quantity since Britten's official opus numbers extend only to 95. Mathews notes that the larger number includes items such as early versions of revised works like Billy Budd; compositions that were withdrawn; arrangements; a substantial body of incidental music for theater, radio, and film; and unfinished pieces like a Clarinet Concerto for Benny Goodman (several of which, including this score, have been subsequently reconstructed for performance).17Of special interest in the Thematic Catalog is the massive body of juvenilia Britten composed between the ages of six and eighteen, representing more than 1,100 sources for nearly 800 compositions. These spans the items from BTC 1: Do You No That My Daddy Has Gone to London Today from 1919 ([the six-year-old's spelling] for two or three voices and piano), pieces written during Britten's early years of study with Frank Bridge which began in 1928, through the Sinfonietta Op. 1 (BTC 746), composed in 1932 when he was 18.The juvenilia provides a vivid testament both to Britten's talent and his determination to become a composer, as is clear in the pace of his output, which reached a high point in 1925 with 127 pieces.18 But the breadth and range of these works and fragments also offer a window into Britten's experience of a broad swath of the British musical world in the years after war. There are pieces in many genres, including a large number of string quartets, songs, choral works, organ music, and parlor pieces that summon up a nine-year-old's sense of "exotic" styles (and spelling) like the Three Songs from Other Countries, BTC 43 (1922), for piano, cornet, and banjo: "The Eygptain Song," "The Indian Cheege Song" and "The Song of the Banjo." In his study of the juvenilia, Christopher Mark notes Britten's growing awareness of contemporary music, including that of Delius and Holst when he was 13, and—thanks to influence of Bridge—works by Berg and Schoenberg by the time he was 16.19Part of the value of the Thematic Catalog relates to Britten's reticence, especially in contrast to Schoenberg and Cage, to discuss his music or creative process. In one of his few statements, the brief "How a Musical Work Originates" (1942), he notes the importance of an external stimulus such as a special occasion or a commission, but he emphasizes the necessity for a "purely musical idea or germ."20 There are, of course, many works and fragments that are not particularly interesting, as Britten noted when near the end of his life he reworked some of his piano pieces from the ages 10–12 as the Five Waltzes: "Since the composer was a very ordinary little boy, they are all pretty juvenile (here was no Mozart, I fear)."21 But there are many early pieces and fragments that allow us to hear some of these stimulating musical ideas in something close to their original form, such as BTC 58 (1923), a eight-measure recitative in A minor with a strange Peter Quint-like melody (see Fig. 2); Britten marks the final cadence pppppppppp, along with an indication for the una corda pedal.Britten himself clearly greatly valued his early compositional efforts, keeping the collection with him wherever he traveled, and returning to the pieces as sources of inspiration and material throughout his life, notably starting as early as the Simple Symphony (1934) when he was twenty. Pointing to the importance of the theme of childhood that scholars have noted in many of Britten's works, the composer wrote of the 1969 collection of songs written four decades earlier, Tit for Tat: Five Settings from Boyhood of Poems by Walter de la Mare: "Although I hold no claims for the songs' importance or originality I do feel that the boy's vision has simplicity and clarity which might have given a little pleasure to the great poet, with his unique insight into a child's mind."22Although the general public is likely to have had less exposure to performances of John Cage's music than to Britten or even Schoenberg, the inclusion of his scores and artworks in museum collections around the world have made them unusually visible in the contemporary cultural scene. The recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage's 4′33″, focused on the museum's newly acquired manuscript of one of Cage's attempts to notate the work using proportional notation. Forming a context for the manuscript, the exhibition included scores by La Monte Young, Mieko Shiomi, a large collection of Fluxus materials, and foundational works of sound art such as Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of Its Own Making.23Cage had a lifelong interest in scores and music notation, in particular the ways that new forms of notation could represent and motivate new ways of creating and hearing sounds. The more than four hundred scores he solicited for the 1969 book Notations, as part of a fund-raising project for the Cunningham Dance Foundation, became the core of a massive collection of correspondence, programs, clippings, and other musical ephemera he began donating to the Northwestern University Library in the 1970s. Deborah Campana, who was the music/public-services librarian at Northwestern, notes that he started in the 1960s to organize his personal archive: "Not merely would he maintain his music manuscripts and organize correspondence received, he would keep anything anyone sent him much like a time capsule."24In contrast to the Schoenberg and Britten archives, which gather in one place significant portions of each composer's Nachlaß, Cage himself made sure that his papers would be more widely disseminated. In addition to the materials he sent to Northwestern, he donated his writings to Wesleyan University Press (which had published Silence and other books), while his books on mycology and gardening went to the University of California, Santa Cruz.25 The scores and other materials made available through the John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive came to the New York Public Library through the efforts of the John Cage Trust, founded by Merce Cunningham and musicologist and Cage's assistant Laura Kuhn. After a team of scholars gathered and cataloged Cage's music, an anonymous donor purchased the collection for the library.26The emphases of the Living Archive, created by New York Public Library in collaboration with the John Cage Trust and Cage's publisher C. F. Peters, are on interactivity and accessibility.27 Virtually every page includes places for user comments, as well as links to share the information through myriad forms of social media; as I discuss further below, a defining feature of the site is the ability for users to upload videos of their own performances of Cage's music. The graphically pleasing design of the home page encourages a sense of exploration through a selection of more than eighty manuscripts, videos, and other materials that appear to hang on threads like a mobile (Fig. 3). While some basic background information on Cage is provided, including a short biography and timeline, the site serves more as an invitation into his music and thought than a comprehensive overview. It is possible to browse the various categories of objects: manuscripts, videos, and "ephemera," which includes concert programs, photographs, and a receipt he submitted to the League of Composers for the cost incurred in buying the bolts, screws, and other items used to prepare the piano for his Sonatas & Interludes. For those wishing to dig deeper, every item includes links to the NYPL catalog, the John Cage Trust, and C. F Peters.28The site currently includes individually citable manuscripts of thirty-six pieces selected from throughout Cage's life. Clicking on the image opens a window onto high resolution scans of materials ranging from fragmentary sketches to complete manuscripts, accompanied by a short description and cataloging information; many works are represented by multiple pages, such as Cartridge Music, with twenty-three scans. The collection is full of fascinating items, including five pages tracing the development of 0'00". Composed and premiered in Tokyo in 1962, the piece is dedicated to Yoko Ono and Toshi Ichiyanagi, illustrating the rich international networks of experimental music that are being charted by Benjamin Piekut, Brigid Cohen, and others.29 Manuscripts with heavy performance annotations like the nine pages for the Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) for piano and two turntables, also illustrate the fluid boundaries in Cage's music between work, the creative process, and the act of performance.The most innovative feature of the Living Archive is the inclusion of more than thirty videos of performances of Cage's works that have been submitted by professionals, students, and amateurs. Eschewing any sense of a restrictive performance practice of these pieces, or what Judy Lochhead has described as "an experimental sound ideal" in Cage's circle,30 the call for submissions encourages a spirit of openness and play:An especially interesting video intercuts three performances of the indeterminate piano piece TV Köln (1960) by doctoral students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This makes it possible to hear and see how differently musicians can interpret the score, as well as the degree to which the three versions are all clearly still the same piece. Also noteworthy is a version of Cage's Balinese gamelan-inspired prepared piano piece Bacchanale (1940) reinterpreted by the Ceraken Balinese gamelan ensemble. The 4′33″ app, released in early 2014 by the John Cage Trust, demonstrates the potential for interactivity on a global scale.31 In addition to the sounds of Cage's apartment, hundreds of users have uploaded their own versions of the piece documenting their local soundscapes around the world.With the increasing number of online archival materials for many composers, and the ever-expanding interest in the creative process in all areas of the arts, it is clear that we are only in the early stages of exploring the possibilities for how archives can use the Internet to facilitate research, teaching, and performance. It is also likely with growing pressures towards public access by funding organizations in many countries that online accessibility may become more of a requirement than an enhancement.The three websites considered here provide useful models for very different ways that archives can provide access to huge amounts of information and materials through our computers and mobile devices. At the same time, as more archival materials become available online it will be important to make clear the limitations of even the highest quality scans, as well as the stubborn materiality of objects that resist any sort of virtual representation. In none of the cases considered here are the online resources meant to replace actual work in the archive; similarly no matter how detailed the catalogs are, interacting with archivists remains crucial for substantial research projects. The question of the long-term stability or sustainability of these or any digital resources—in comparison to the centuries we use to measure the lifespan of traditional archival holdings--is emerging as an increasingly urgent question.32 Indeed even during the few months I have been involved in this project, various aspects of these three sites have been in flux, and more substantial changes are on the horizon.33Finally, as with the incredible convenience and breadth of JSTOR, it will be increasingly necessary to remind students and ourselves that even the most extensive website can only represent a fraction of what is available in the archives. Indeed, arguably the most significant contribution of these websites is the incentive they provide to make the trip to the archives themselves in order to experience in new ways the much richer resources of the non-virtual world.