[Smt-talk] Palestrina and Jeppesen, was: MISSING THEORY COMPONENT?

[Thomas Holme Hansen]

Dear SMT-listers,

I read Prof. Schubert's contribution to this thread with some regret. Usually, the discussions on smt-talk are relevant and interesting, and the arguments are well-founded. Prof. Schubert's views on melody writing and on Knud Jeppesen perhaps are relevant and interesting, but that remains to be substantiated. By Prof. Schubert. Thanks to Olli Väisälä for his remark in this respect, and thanks to Richard Hermann and Christopher Bonds for their contributions, too.

Assertions like " Jeppesen, a scholar who admired Palestrina's tunes for their Wagnerian qualities, and who had no idea how counterpoint works" are better off just left to oblivion. And Prof. Schubert's view on "any historical source" are suprising, to put it mildly.

In my view, Palestrina's music is a historical source, and I'm sure that Jeppesen's knowledge of this music - not least Palestrina's counterpoint - was well-founded. I have seen the original sheets with Jeppesen's notes from his thorough study of the old Palestrina edition. And I have read hundreds of his letters, a fair number of whose document a profound knowledge of Palestrina's music - and counterpoint. Why else would esteemed musicologists by the dozen have written to Jeppesen for decades,
expressing their admiration for his dissertation and his counterpoint book?

The details brought forward by Richard Hermann regarding Jeppesen's two books and the 'Wagnerian question' are consistent with notes from my own studies. In addition, it can be mentioned that Jeppesen in 1924 gave a public lecture on 'Richard Wagner in the light of modern musicology' (translation not accurate), but apart from that (the lecture was assigned) there is nothing that indicates any particular interest in Wagner on Jeppesen's behalf. 

Should anyone be interested in more info on Knud Jeppesen, a Jeppesen website is hosted by The Royal Library in Copenhagen, http://www.kb.dk/da/nb/tema/fokus/jeppesen, and a complete catalogue of Jeppesen's writings, editions and compositions can be found at http://www.kb.dk/export/sites/kb_dk/da/publikationer/online/fund_og_forskning/download/kjkatalog.pdf.

Thomas Holme Hansen, Associate professor, Ph.D.
Section for Musicology, Aarhus University
Denmark
musthh at hum.au.dk




 Jeppesen was the counterpoint text I had as an undergraduate (1960s). It was a one-semester course. (The second semester we used Kent Kennan's book based on baroque counterpoint.) I worked hard to try to get it right. My skills improved slowly over many years after that. Now I can go back to the books and really understand what their strengths and weaknesses were. Today I write pretty good counterpoint (or so I've been told by persons who know), and I owe it to those seeds that were sown. With
all respect, to say that Jeppesen had no idea how counterpoint works seems like a pretty broad generalization on the part of Prof. Väisälä. 

Christopher Bonds
Wayne State College, Emeritus

 I wish to apologize to Prof. Väisälä for attributing the quote below to him. I should have attributed it to Prof. Peter Schubert. Sorry for the error!

Christopher Bonds
Wayne State College, Emeritus

Dear SMT-listers,

There are two books by Knud Jeppesen that seem to pertain to this issue between Profs. Schubert and Väisälä. The well-known (or should be to English speaking scholars of Renaissance music and of counterpoint) The Style of Palestrina and Dissonance, trans. Edward J. Dent and his Counterpoint trans.& intro. Glen Haydon. The later provides a valuable introduction to the history of counterpoint within its Part 1.

In J's Style of Palestrina, I find both references to many “late Medieval" and also “Renaissance” theorists as well as those subsequent. The book also features extensive references to Palestrina’s oeuvre in support of his observations. There is only one reference to Wagner on p. 164 and footnote in the index, and that page is in a section discussing dissonance treatment between voices and about the ontology of augmented or diminished chords in P’s style. As for his Counterpoint
textbook, it has one reference to Wagner on p. 69. There in a footnote the discussion is on leading-tones in modes and how it later becomes important as part of the V to I eventually becoming transformed into Wagnerian and Post-Wagnerian harmony.

I would like to know in more detail where Prof. Schubert found evidence for J’s admiration of P’s melodies for their Wagnerian qualities. Also, evidence that there is a theory of melody in J. 

This idea of a theory of melody in J may be due to translation from, German, to English in 1946. The word melody is stretched to cover many very different ideas, especially in English at that time, that are quite different subsets of lynes (borrowed and adapted from Boretz). By lyne I mean a one pitch at a time succession that is perceptually understood to represent a musical entity. This would include items like melody, theme, subject, inner accompanying voice, tune, answer, countersubject, bass
line, etc. Perhaps there are other relevant sources of which I am unaware. 

In J’s Style, the chapter on Melody quotes heavily from P with other Renaissance composers represented and one Bach quotation. There are many references to P’s works for each principle discussed. Other than a passing reference to Schubert’s Miller Lieder, I found no other references to 19th-century music and none to Wagner in any form although my examination was a bit cursory. The discussion appears not to be a theory of melody but rather of how to write acceptable lynes in the style of
Palestrina.

This discussion raises a broader epistemological issue: is the only acceptable evidence from theorists of the day? Can we reasonably ignore extensive evidence from the scores themselves in this case? 

I would welcome statistical studies periodically redone as theoretical concepts and categories become more refined, changed, or even rejected. These, of course, could not simply and directly be used in either model composition or analysis from the repertoire, but it would provide a better set of starting points. They would not be theories but rather “teachings” in the sense of Schoenberg’s use of “Harmonielehre” with the limited kind of support that empirical studies provide. Certainly
knowledge of the theorists of the day should be continually consulted in devising lists of what should be counted but they also should be open to critique in light of findings. The discussion, I hope, will remain open. There is so much yet to learn about this repertoire.

Best,

Richard Hermann, PhD, Prof. of Music
Regent's Lecturer
Univ. of New Mexico
[ mailto:harhar at unm.edu ]harhar at unm.edu


Dear Prof. Schubert,

Your harsh verdict of Jeppesen ("no idea") would be more productive, if you took the trouble of substantiating it.

I would like to be a fly on the wall of the present-day counterpoint classrooms where this type of writing is taught—is it just recycled Jeppesen? It's for sure not any historical source: no treatise in the Renaissance addresses "good melody writing" (except for the most obvious errors). Palestrina, like everybody else, stole, modeled, recycled, and wrote brilliant tunes, but there was no theory of melody in his day. 

I think Jeppesen was fully aware that there was no such theory in Palestrina's day. But this certainly does not suffice to imply that we should not utilize Palestrina's music – or Jeppesen's ideas about it – in trying to approach principles of "good melody writing."


Best wishes,
Olli Väisälä
Sibelius Academy
University of the Arts, Helsinki
[ mailto:ovaisala at siba.fi ]ovaisala at siba.fi




I always found it ironic that Palestrina is the model for general principles of melody writing. This has been the case since Jeppesen, a scholar who admired Palestrina's tunes for their Wagnerian qualities, and who had no idea how counterpoint works. 

I would like to be a fly on the wall of the present-day counterpoint classrooms where this type of writing is taught—is it just recycled Jeppesen? It's for sure not any historical source: no treatise in the Renaissance addresses "good melody writing" (except for the most obvious errors). Palestrina, like everybody else, stole, modeled, recycled, and wrote brilliant tunes, but there was no theory of melody in his day. 

All that said, I agree with Victor Grauer that melodies are formed in context, and that IS supported by at least one theorist then: Juan Bermudo, who says “counterpoint is the father of melody.”

Peter Schubert
Schulich School of Music
McGill University
555 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, QC Â H3A 1E3
(514) 398-4535 x00281 


Olli Väisälä <ovaisala at siba.fi> writes:
>First, my thanks to Richard Hermann for summarizing some of those features of Jeppesen's works that make Peter Schubert's view of J. to appear surprising. (I could not have done this as easily since I don't have the English translations at hand.)
>
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>Then, some comments to Richard's more general points:
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>This discussion raises a broader epistemological issue: is the only acceptable evidence from theorists of the day? Can we reasonably ignore extensive evidence from the scores themselves in this case?
>
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>Where I teach, it is taken for granted that a primary tool in any "model composition" is the intensive analysis (and more or less analytically oriented playing and listening) of "the scores themselves." Of course, analysis can and must be informed by relevant concepts, and those of contemporaneous theorists can be most revealing. Nevertheless, it is not at all realistic to think that those theorists covered all significant aspects of the music. Music is hugely multi-dimensional, and there can be
>several dimensions that the contemporaneous theorists did not have motivation or insight to describe. (We might compare some dimensions of musical organization to linguistic syntax. Just like we speak fluently our languages, observing syntactic principles without ever being aware of this, composers may have fluently observed musical principles that they or their contemporary theorists never made explicit.)
>
>
>
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>I would welcome statistical studies periodically redone as theoretical concepts and categories become more refined, changed, or even rejected. These, of course, could not simply and directly be used in either model composition or analysis from the repertoire, but it would provide a better set of starting points. They would not be theories but rather “teachings” in the sense of Schoenberg’s use of “Harmonielehre” with the limited kind of support that empirical studies provide. Certainly
>knowledge of the theorists of the day should be continually consulted in devising lists of what should be counted but they also should be open to critique in light of findings. The discussion, I hope, will remain open. There is so much yet to learn about this repertoire.
>
>
>I also welcome statistical studies, but it seems to me that at their present stage such studies tend to be a bit elementary when compared to the multi-dimensionality of music. For example, David Huron mentions in his book (Sweet Expectations) several statistical studies concerning melody formation in Palestrina and other sources. One very general melodic principle is "step inertia," according to which a step in a certain direction tends to be followed by another similar step. However, the
>statistical study Huron quoted (by whom, I don't remember) did not take into account meter, i.e., the difference between strong-weak and weak-strong steps. I suspected that there is a big difference between these two situations and tested my assumption with a small informal statistical study of a sample of chorale melodies. It appeared that I was right: strong-weak steps had a significantly higher statistical tendency of being followed by the step in the same direction than weak-strong steps.
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>This is just one very simple example of multi-dimensionality: for describing melodic principles, it may be necessary to allow for the interaction of pitch and meter. Needless to say, the questions get much more complicated when proceeding towards larger Gestalten.
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>Olli Väisälä
>Sibelius Academy
>University of the Arts, Helsinki
>[ mailto:ovaisala at siba.fi ]ovaisala at siba.fi
>
>
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