Glenn Gould, in a 1974 article about Mahler's son-in-law, Křenek, could happily write that composers shy away from history much as pop stars avoid learning to read scores (in Page 1988: 181). While this might have occasioned letters to the editor, it is a strange assertion. One could just as easily level this at performers, some of whom play music without much reflection on the background and performance traditions of particular works. An example of such a piece is Jesu, joy of man's desiring (from Cantata 147) which is often played at a speed that Bach could not have countenanced, due to how the tactus precludes certain options. I explore this in Johann Assassination Bach (a Solo-Duet piece for viola and
organ) where Bach's music is destroyed by simply successively increasing the note values. Paradoxically, while this leads to a deep dissatisfaction with the enterprise, such a designed anhedonia is arguably satisfying because it succeeds in its self-proclaimed unsatisfaction.
Some form of link to the past (whether recent or distant) is part of music's basic material, and the ancient Greeks accorded Mnemosyne her status as the chief of the nine muses. Both physically and physiologically (e.g. in knowing one's scales so that one applies this memory when encountering new music), as well as mentally (in acknowledging that music exists in some prior context), music demands some form of re-living when performed. Composers (dead or alive) provide much of the material which is then woven by the
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performer, and since many composers themselves are also performers they too encounter other musics that may have unfamiliar or intriguing characteristics. In one sense, music is used to conjour up the past, with the original brief for Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty (1888) being "melodies in the spirit of Lully, Bach and Rameau" (Homans: 272), even if our contemporary ears find that implausible. While one might think that the archaeologists of music are musicologists (in digging up and exhibiting an ancient Vivaldi concerto, for example), composers, in their compositional activity, can also act as archaeologists, sometimes acting unconsciously, consciously or even self-consciously. Seiber, quoted by Keller (in Wintle ed. 1994: 87), says that composing is a "journey of discovery", and part of this document's purpose is to record such a journey.
Over time, even if it is not fully remembered by any individual, a greater bank of music is built up. T. S. Eliot's notion (in Taruskin 1995: 302) that "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer… has a simultaneous existence" means that we cannot avoid bumping into memory, not due to technological ubiquity, but because literature (and also music)—ancient or modern—is brought alive in any new production of art. Borges's comment (2000: 236) that authors create their precursors is similar, yet it is not merely a matter of assigning attribution, but realising that one can fruitfully see an almost psychoanalytical dimension where latent ideas are subsequently made manifest. Of course,
post hoc, listeners and analysts might see how a particular piece works, but such a realisation
only take places after the event. Artistic originality, then, never seems to fit a predictive or prescribed formula, with Keller talking of the "unpredictable inevitability" of art (in Wintle 1995: xix). Salman Rushdie in Shame has the line that "[a]ll stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been" (1985: 116), and while this relates somewhat to the notion of spectre, it reminds us that music is not just about resonance with what is there on the page or in performance but about avoided options and fulfilled choices.
Brahms has long been recognised as an extraordinary composer who was, according to fellow composer Hugh Wood, "oppressed by and in love with… the past, but not defeated by it" (in Musgrave ed. 1999: 282). Brahms's transformation ('deployment' might be a better word) of the melody from Spohr's C major Sextet, Op. 140 (1848), into the theme of the
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last movement of his First Symphony of 1876 (in Hefling ed. 2004: 166) is remarkably brazen, and yet becomes more resonant (and understandable) when one knows that Brahms also owned the Spohr manuscript. That the German word for 'track'—as in someone 'covering their tracks'—sounds similar to the name Spohr proves nothing, but it invites a more elliptical, involved (even baroque) reading of Brahms and text. A kabbalistic approach reveals hidden unintentional connections which possess an almost mystical power. For example, Auden's first published poem Woods in Rain (1924) was ascribed by Heinemann to 'W. H. Arden', making one wonder if a proof-reader saw something Shakespearean in it (Osborne 1982: 74). Ravel, too, clearly modelled works on pieces by others (particularly Schubert, Chopin and Chabrier), treating his studio like a laboratory to carry out what he called his "experiments" (see Nichols 1987: 55). Other approaches to covering one's tracks can rely on the mutual ignorance of audience constituencies, dislocation of genre and the listener's own predelictions. Richard Rodgers's 1943 musical
Oklahama!—"pretty good music" according to Adrian Boult (Kennedy 1987: 204) —might
be said to derive 'There's a bright golden haze on the meadow' from the end of Stanford's
Magnificat in A of 1880; and in The Sound of Music (from 1959), 'The hills are alive' features in
the Finale of Sibelius's Symphony no. 2 (1902), while 'Favourite things' mimics a moment in the Scherzo of Mendelssohn's Piano Trio no. 1 of 1839. More questionable is a largely forgotten organ piece (an 1897 Adagio in E flat by Stainer) appearing in 1982 as Highland
Cathedral: with identical medium, key, meter, harmony and melodic profile, one wonders if
Borges' author Pierre Menard—who writes Don Quixote verbatim—is alive and well.