Clive Brown on historical performance, notation, and the meaning behind the score

Dialogue with the past: an interview

Clive Brown is a violinist and researcher specialized in historical perspectives on Classical and Romantic repertoire and performance practices. He earned his PhD in 1980 at Oxford University, where he lectured until 1991, before becoming Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds (now Emeritus). Currently, he teaches at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. Brown's practice-led research has produced numerous articles on early music performance, notation, and critical editing, together with editions of Brahms's Violin Concerto and complete sonatas, Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and Beethoven's violin sonatas for Bärenreiter, as well as Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Choral Fantasia, and Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, and 5 for Breitkopf und Härtel. In this conversation with Marcus Held, Brown reflects on his career and his views on historical performance.

Since the generations of Arnold Dolmetsch and Wanda Landowska, many approaches to historical performance have emerged. How would you define this field today?

Well, the term now covers pretty much everything into the early twentieth century—from Mahler, Elgar, Strauss, as far back as we can go. We haven't ventured further into the twentieth century yet, but that may come.

Researching later periods raises fascinating challenges because we have recordings of musicians born well before 1850. The remarkable thing is that almost nobody wants to play music the way those recordings suggest! The recordings reveal how different the past was from the present. We do not and cannot know how eighteenth-century music sounded—we can only guess, and we probably would not get very close.

This poses crucial questions about what we are trying to do. I dislike the idea of recreating the past, because the past is irretrievably lost. What I do appreciate is discovering different ways of looking at musical performance and uncovering the varying meanings behind notation. That is one of the central points: the meaning of notation. We read notation as we were taught as children, our hard-wired expectations shaped through years of training. A great deal of my research aims to understand how past musicians' training and experience determined what notation meant for them.

When Beethoven wrote down his music, what did he think he was conveying? He certainly was not trying to communicate the same things we would by putting the same notes on a page today. Many now speak of "the composer's intentions," usually understood as staying close to the literal notation. But a composer like Beethoven had very clear intentions for his notation—his sole intention for performance was that it should be beautiful. He and all gifted contemporaries knew that achieving beauty required something quite different from what the notation literally says.

If we uncover what lay behind the notes, we can use historical techniques to make our own performances more interesting and creative, without being unfaithful to the composer's intentions—because these practices were expected from a cultivated musician. Conventions evolve constantly, but they often produce a style that would have been considered inappropriate in the past. Composition and performance must develop and change, but changes of style are not necessarily progress. Sometimes we throw out the baby with the bath water.

I have listened many times to recordings by Joachim, Leopold Auer, Saint-Saëns, Barbirolli conducting Tchaikovsky. It is fascinating that we do not try to imitate them.

Yes, definitely! It is also very difficult to persuade musicians to do that. We feel insecure when taken out of our comfort zone. For example—since we are both violinists—modern teachers often say most bow strokes should initiate from the shoulder. This first appears in writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before that, the teaching was the opposite: "You never move the shoulder unless you absolutely have to." The upper arm remains completely passive; everything comes from the elbow and wrist. If you try that technique, you realize certain modern bow strokes become impossible. Exploring what that standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technique can achieve has been an enormously fascinating journey.

Is this still a movement?

Well, that depends on what you mean. The early music movement, as I perceive it, began in the 1960s—I lived through that. When I started playing violin in the 1950s, the movement didn't exist. I don't think I was aware of it until the 1970s. Change keeps things alive. The early music movement owed much of its success to novelty. Passionate young musicians were trying to do something exciting and new. The revival of old instruments dates back to the nineteenth century, but it never aroused much interest—Arnold Dolmetsch's efforts were seen as quaint rather than serious. Then in the 1960s, when many social conventions were challenged, young period-instrument performers became truly successful because they made Baroque music sound totally different from how it had been played—more lively and exotic.

But it became a commercial product. The recording industry is very commercial; you must produce something people want to hear. When I reviewed several Beethoven symphony recordings in the 1980s, I used the analogy of a supermarket. You see fruit beautifully packaged and it looks wonderful, then you take it home only to find it's not ripe. I noted already then that "there is infinitely more to historically sensitive performance than merely employing the right equipment, and that the public is in danger of being offered attractively packaged, but unripe fruit." Those groups were doing unfamiliar, exciting things, but it wasn't based on very deep knowledge. Their style resembled a modified version of modern performance without true connection to how people in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the relationship between notation and performance. But it worked! People wanted it, and it became a commercial product.

It feels paradoxical. Teaching sometimes, I cannot give a definitive answer—"I don't really know."

Yes, we can be honest about uncertainty. But for a concert or recording, you must make decisions. And often those decisions aren't based primarily on what seems historically appropriate, but rather on "If I did this, the public might not like it, so I'll do what I know they like."

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That's absolutely true, I must say…

In Vienna my students and I constantly experiment with known historical practices: with portamento—already common in the later eighteenth century—with different bow strokes, rarely playing notes exactly as written, bending rhythms, subtly nuancing tempo. It is great fun, and many become enthusiastic about seeing notation differently. Yet they say, "But I can't do that for my regular lesson" or "I wouldn't win the audition if I played this way." It takes courage and time for change.

I am too old now, but today's wonderful young players, all fantastic technicians, are discovering a broader idea of what this music can mean. I believe that could make Classical music a much more compelling emotional experience for those who currently avoid it for being too "stuffy" or rigid.

This repertoire predates musical institutions. How do you feel teaching it within institutional schedules, programs, deadlines, and exams?

Officially, I retired and moved to Austria in 2017 for family reasons. Now I teach in Vienna because I enjoy it; they offer an elective called "Performing Practice in Classical and Romantic Music." I give some lectures, then we workshop chamber music. It is wonderful for example to experiment with talented young musicians playing Beethoven or Brahms in entirely different ways from modern practice, as suggested in my recent Bärenreiter editions.

I do not find teaching in an institution problematic. Visiting as a guest professor elsewhere, most students are new to these ideas but become very excited! They often say, "Of course, I can't do this for my regular teacher"—but they open their minds to new possibilities.

Throughout, I try to help people read notation differently. Over the twentieth century we became fixated on playing strictly what appears on the page—very precisely, not really bending rhythms. Even when over-dotting a little, we remain strictly tied to the score. That is not how it was done in previous eras. Around 1800 in German theory, there was the concept of richtiger Vortrag (correct performance) and schöner Vortrag (beautiful performance). Students learned correct performance first; then they had to learn beautiful performance—going beyond the written notes. But authorities claimed this could not be taught; you had to emulate great performers. One writer in 1804 (A. E. Müller) said that without sufficient talent, you never surpass correct performance, but can still be a "useful orchestral player, a useful choral singer"—which is worthwhile, but is not art.

In my view, modern performance remains essentially richtiger Vortrag almost all the time. We have lost the courage to go beyond the notes as expected performance convention at those points — full courage perhaps must follow the perception of what became allowed.

I've watched your lecture on "The deceptive simplicity of musical notation." It was fascinating seeing Ferdinand David's part of Beethoven's violin concerto, with bowing, fingering—even ornamentation modified. People in the nineteenth century were much freer than we thought.

Yes indeed. The nineteenth-century trend was toward stricter and stricter realation of the written product that into the twentieth century lead modernist view of erase and seeking what reinvents itself as radically, method effectively so endly. Many older traditions apparently preserved some continuity throughout the century into emerging later performing groups contemporary.

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“We were all taught to put one finger down and keep the others up because you wanted to do lots of vibrato all the time. But, in the 19th century, they kept all their fingers down unless they had to lift them up. That changes the whole way that the left hand works, the way you shift and so on. Then, you didn't normally try to disguise your shifts, so you used quite different fingering patterns to ensure that you shifted, wherever possible, in places that required an expressive portamento.”

“It is really hard to put into words. It is the sort of thing that you can only do with your instrument in your hands. It would be nice if we could have our two instruments here now to experiment together, but we are a little bit too far apart!”

Personally, sometimes I get overwhelmed with the managing of sort of a two-sided life: as a performer and as a researcher. Any tips on that?

Oh, yes! Good heavens! For most of my time in the university—as a professor—I was busy trying to do all the horrible administration that was required. Managing a department, managing my own teaching and so on.

It is a different world altogether now for me. Since I retired, I can choose what I want to teach and I have much, much more time to do the research I want to do, which is why I am trying to write a revised edition of my 1999 book! I have learned much more during the last quarter century! The burden of university teaching and administration, which has got worse over the years, does not create an ideal environment for research, and the things that were necessary to do the research also don’t go very well with playing the violin.

When editing such central masterpieces of Music History, like Beethoven symphonies, what is your principal aim?

My aim is to go beyond the text. The tradition of making an Urtext is to create a reliable text which is either based on an autograph, or an early edition and with all the evidence for which notes are the correct notes, and which markings are the correct markings intended by the composer. And that is great, because we all need to have that kind of information. But it generally stops there, and my feeling, when I was first asked to edit things (which was by Breitkopf & Härtel, in the 1990s), was that I wanted to go a little bit beyond that and try to explain what I thought the notes were actually meant to tell the performer. I could do that in a small way in the early editions I made, writing some things in the preface. With Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, I went a bit further, including an Urtext solo part and also a part with my own fingering and bowing, based on historical editions. I played the first performance from this edition with my university students orchestra.

I started making editions for Bärenreiter with the Brahms’ Violin Concerto. Basically, I was still doing that same thing, but I also wanted to make an edition with historic fingerings and bowings for this concerto too. So, there are two violin parts: the first edition (the Urtext) and one with all of Joachim’s extra markings from his 1905 Violinschule.

That gave me the idea that, when I had another opportunity, I would make my own version of the violin part, with bowing and fingering based on historical practice (if there wasn’t some historical model I could use) and also to include bar-by-bar performing practice commentaries, drawing on all the evidence I could find. That’s what I have done recently in a number of editions: Brahms’ complete duo sonatas (2015), which I made with two of my former PhD students (pianist Neal Peres Da Costa and cellist Kate Bennett Wadsworth). Most recently I edited Beethoven’s violin sonatas (in 2020), for Bärenreiter. The editions get bigger and bigger! The publishers got a little bit alarmed when I told them we would need to have at least a hundred pages for the performing practice commentaries [Laughs], on which Neal and I collaborated again. The solution was to issue the commentary online—which you can get cost free from the Bärenreiter website.

I think it is worthwhile to do that: to try to assemble the things we know about this repertoire—about how people played it, what the notation meant to them—and to make that available to people, to experiment with.

Sometimes, it is actually a discomfort to put that musical knowledge into words. It is so much easier to grab your violin and play the way you think about it.

Yes, absolutely! Maybe, the next stage is to have some audio or video examples. I have been talking about that with some of my colleagues, my former PhD students that I still work with… Maybe that is the next stage!

How does musical notation help or annoy you in the process of editing?

It doesn’t annoy me; it doesn’t exactly help me: it fascinates me! As you said before—you are right—there is a limit to what you can explain about music in words. But there is quite a lot you can say about the historical background, which might be helpful to people. You can give them ideas. You can’t tell them what it really means, but you can tell them what it doesn’t mean. Actually, I think that is probably the most important thing. You have to tell them what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean what it literally says, and that is a big step for most people.

How Ur can an Urtext edition really be?

I think, from a scholarly point of view, it can be pretty Ur. It depends on what your sources are. If you are editing, for instance, Mozart’s last three symphonies, all we have is the autograph. You have to put that on paper as best as you can. Mozart is a good example, because there has been controversy about whether or not he meant two different kinds of articulation marks: dots and strokes. You look at these autographs, and you have, visually, a wide range of articulation marks: from great big strokes to tiny little strokes, or dots.

In fact, when you try to place them in two categories, you encounter big problems, because then you have a choice. Is this one small enough to be a dot? Is it big enough to be a stroke? From that point of view, when you have a printed Urtext, you can’t possibly show all of those tiny differences. Therefore, you are always, when you have to choose one of two articulation marks, in danger of being unfaithful to your source. But it wouldn’t really be very helpful, to the user, to have a print which shows exactly how big each one of the articulation marks was. It would also be impractical to do it. For people who are curious to know such things, the increasing availability of digital archives is a wonderful resource.

It is a very complex issue. You have to do the best you can to provide not only a clear, scholarly text, but also the kind of contextualisation that makes its potential meanings as clear as possible to the users. On that basis they can make informed artistic decisions.

It is complex, indeed. It came to my mind now the process of transcribing this interview. I won’t be able to stress the syllables of your words, your stops, breaths, exclamations. Maybe it is part of the sound’s ephemerality problem.

Yes! That is a good parallel with music making.

Is it possible to identify oral tradition within the traditional Romantic symphonic repertoire?

Well, we were talking about early recordings earlier. We have some absolutely fascinating information from early recordings, which is incredibly revealing and rather shocking and, sometimes, very disturbing.

I take Carl Reinecke, for example. He was born in 1824, and in his 80s he made many piano roll recordings. He was one of the great German pianists, a really important musical figure—a significant composer and writer, as well. He wrote books about Mozart playing and about Mozart concertos. In neither of those books does he ever mention arpeggiating chords when it isn’t written. Never. Nowhere. If he’d died without making recordings, we might have imagined he always played his hands absolutely together! The recordings are really shocking, because he almost never plays his hands exactly together. He spreads nearly everything, one way or another. Sometimes very much, sometimes merely a bit. Just occasionally he plays both of them together.

Without those recordings, we would have no knowledge of this aspect of his playing. The fact that he, the oldest great performer on record, played with more spreading of chords than younger pianists in early recordings is striking. In other words, it was so natural in the mid-19th century that he did not think it was worth writing about. Of course, some musicians did write about chord spreading, usually to criticise excess. But no-one criticised Reinecke for this, as far as I have been able to discover, and he was famous for his ‘classical’ performance style, which suggests that his way of doing it wasn’t something you needed to debate, because everybody knew that is how you should play.

Recordings have that kind of information, which we couldn’t possibly get without them. Joachim, for instance, was not concerned about playing exactly together with his pianist. If you do one of these wonderful computer tests on Joachim’s recordings, you can tell that it would have been a nightmare for the modern recording engineer. He is usually either a little ahead or a little behind… You don’t notice when you listen to it, because it is all so natural. But it is not what we would do today. We are absolutely required to play everything with great vertical togetherness. Recording engineers get terribly upset if you don’t.

And you would not be called to the next gig!

[Laughs] Yes! Nowadays, I am really heartened by the interest of so many talented young musicians in all of these things. I think it is time for us to have a change, and from the work I do with young musicians, I’m convinced that they are very open to experiment and to enlarging the range of expressive gestures, which historical knowledge offers us. I think that a lot of younger musicians would like to challenge the status quo, but they are still rather frightened of doing it because their careers are still in the hands of

musicians who have very different ideas about what is acceptable, and also because they don’t know how the public might respond to the performance of familiar repertoire in a strikingly different way. They have to please their audiences, and the critics to be successful.

But, actually, the example we started with, the Historically Informed Performance movement of the 1960s and 1970s, can be an inspiration: there was a lot of scepticism, especially from music critics at first, and, to be fair, a lot of the early players weren’t terribly reliable technically. They weren’t always fully in command of their instruments, but something finally caught on, and the technical expertise increased. Maybe it became rather too rigid and stylised, because of the need for a certain kind of technical expertise. But, still, the enthusiasm of the early music performers was infectious, and people increasingly wanted to hear familiar repertoire in a different way and also to hear unfamiliar repertoire from the same period. I suspect something similar is happening now, with a much wider repertoire from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Mahler, including the works of many fine composers whose music we almost never hear in live concerts. The revival of known historical practices can let us hear the classical and romantic repertoire with fresh ears, and perhaps recapture some of the impact it made on its original listeners.

I really look forward, if I live long enough, to seeing this come to fruition!