HARRY WHITE
THE
WELL-TEMPERED
FESTSCHRIFT
Reading Music Preferred
The Well-Tempered Festschrift
Reading Music Preferred
Harry White
The Well-Tempered Festschrift
Reading Music Preferred
Layout and Cover: Nikola Stevanović
Printed and bound in the EU
Harry White:
The Well-Tempered Festschrift. Reading Music Preferred
Vienna: HOLLITZER Verlag, 2020
www.hollitzer.at
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism
and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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ISBN 978-3-99012-781-0
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge, with many thanks, a grant in aid of
publication from the Senate of the National University of Ireland. I am
most grateful to Dr Ciarán Crilly, Head of the UCD School of Music,
for his generous assistance in the production of this book, and to Mr
Eoghan Corrigan for his assistance with layout and formatting of the
typescript. I likewise thank most warmly my desk editor at Hollitzer,
Sigrun Müller, and Professors James William Sobaskie and Michael
Beckermann, who acted as readers for the NUI.
My deepest thanks go to Dr Michael Hüttler for the alacrity with which
he accepted this book for publication and for his editorial care of the
manuscript, and to Professor Lorraine Byrne Bodley, who read a first
draft with her customary care and made many valuable suggestions which
have improved the whole text. Any infelicities or errors which remain are
my own.
To the friends whose work is pictured within
Contents
9
Preliminaries
11
Readings
168
Epilogue
7
8
PRELIMINARIES
In A Long Saturday, a series of interviews between Laure Adler and
George Steiner published in 2017, Steiner remarks that ‘The first line
of my very first book was this: “A good review is an act of thanks.”
I believe that, I believe it wholeheartedly. You have to thank the
works and what they cost their creator.’ 1 This little book is written
in the same spirit. The Well-Tempered Festschrift is a response to Music
Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour
of Harry White, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and published by
Hollitzer Verlag, Vienna, in 2018. Its principal purpose is to thank
the editor and contributors to this extraordinary volume, even if
its slender size amounts to little more than a grace note when set
beside the imposing book it seeks to address: Music Preferred runs to a
formidable 774 pages. Nevertheless, I realize that the ‘act of thanks’
represented by The Well-Tempered Festschrift may seem an excessive
and extravagant gesture to some, not least because (as far as I am
aware), the thing has never been done before. But I am unlikely to
repine on that account. The truth is that Music Preferred is not only
a singular compendium of essays designed to reflect or extend upon
my own research interests over the last thirty-five years; it is also the
collective work of colleagues and former students whose friendship,
society and support have transformed my working life. To be the
recipient of a Festschrift is surely never an ambiguous privilege,
especially when it is offered as ‘a call … to further work, effort and
energy’ (and not as a tombstone intended to silence, once and for
all, the aging but apparently insatiable honoree) 2 but in my case,
certainly, the magnanimity of the whole enterprise is amplified by
the fact that I am the first Irish musicologist to have been honoured
with such a volume. 3
1 See George Steiner, with Laure Adler, A Long Saturday. Conversations
(Chicago and London, 2017), 93–4
2 See Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s introduction to Music Preferred, 38, in which
she cites this definition of a Festschrift from Irving Louis Horovitz,
Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1991). Besides, ‘A Festschrift is much better than a Deadschrift’, as a veteran of
such occasions crisply remarked to me when Music Preferred was launched.
3 But not the first Irish musician: Dear Far-voiced Veteran: Essays in Honour of
Tom Munnelly, edited by Anne Clune, was published in 2007 and A Musical
9
What follows here is a sequence of readings that takes each of the
essays in Music Preferred in turn. 4 I have tried to make the content of
these essays as intelligible as I might to the reader of this book (just
as one would in a formal review), and I have also annotated each
reading with a biographical gloss to account for the circumstances of
my friendship with the author in question. I hope these circumstances
will prove as interesting to readers of The Well-Tempered Festschrift as
they did to me when I recalled them. I hope, too, that the additional
footnotes, to say little of the readings themselves, will please the
contributors to Music Preferred. It is they, first and last, for whom I
write, in an attempt to answer in some small measure the mighty
diapason of this book.
These readings are followed in turn by an epilogue which fulfils
another important (and cherished) obligation, which is to thank
Lorraine Byrne Bodley for her Herculean endeavours in editing
Music Preferred and bringing it to publication. I have also included
thanks to several other people concerned with this venture (notably
Gerard Gillen) and with the memorable launch of Music Preferred on
30 May 2018 at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. If the friends for
whom The Well-Tempered Festschrift is written derive from it even a
fraction of the pleasure which their book gave me, my work will not
have been in vain.
Harry White
Legan, Co. Longford
April 2020
Offering: Essays in Honour of Gerard Gillen, edited by Kerry Houston and
Harry White, was published in 2017.
4 These readings begin directly with the essays themselves: I address the
gracious foreword to Music Preferred by Gerard Gillen (15–16) and Lorraine
Byrne Bodley’s magisterial introduction (17–38) in the epilogue below.
All page references in the main text and footnotes of this book (unless
otherwise indicated) are to the text of Music Preferred. I have subdivided
the readings below by using the original sub-headings therein.
10
READINGS
11
12
PART ONE:
THE MUSICAL BAROQUE
13
14
Julian Horton
The Autonomy of the Musical Work (41–66)
The first essay in this astonishing collection is such a finelywrought
exegesis of Bach’s fugal technique (a reading of the
C-sharp minor fugue in the first volume of The Well-Tempered
Clavier) that I might be forgiven for indefinitely resting in grati tu de
on its borders. Readers familiar with Julian Horton’s work will not
be surprised by its deep rigour and consummate musicianship: it is
almost a commonplace to acknowledge that the inherent complexity
of his readings invariably entails a corresponding lucidity of purpose,
grounded in a contextual or historical awareness that brings relief
and perspective to the density of his analytic engagements. 5 Yet in
this case, Horton breaks new ground. This is the first occasion on
which his formidably synthetic modes of perception have been
brought to bear on Bach.
In this originary enterprise he negotiates between historicist and
neo-Schenkerian models of fugal analysis (and in particular between
5 Julian was my colleague for twelve years at University College Dublin
(UCD). We quickly became fast friends, and his exceptional musicianship
(and sheer knowledge of the repertory) constantly enriched my
intellectual life, as a rule through the agency of my walking into his office
and beginning an impromptu conversation about some piece or other
which he invariably knew better than I did. This was somehow a natural
(if unequal) division of labour: I had the questions and he the answers.
Nevertheless, he was notorious for his ‘three-part questions’ at the end of
public seminars: these were never intended to intimidate (a more unlikely
action in Julian’s case it is impossible to imagine), but when I think of
them now, I realize afresh how much we lost when he was appointed to
the Chair of Music in Durham. The matchless warmth of his presence
and of his musical deliberations day-to-day represent an irreparable loss
to the School of Music at UCD. Nevertheless, he remains a firm friend
to UCD and to the Society for Musicology in Ireland (hereafter, SMI)
and a regular participant in meetings and symposia in Ireland. In 2014
he edited a volume of Irish Musical Studies with Gareth Cox, and he has
recently (2019) been elected a Corresponding Honorary Member of the
SMI. Julian has frequently affirmed the formative and enduring nature of
his affection for Dublin. This is an entirely mutual feeling shared by his
many friends here and elsewhere in Ireland.
15
Harry White
the work of David Ledbetter and William Renwick), but as far as I
can honestly see he transcends both. This is partly because his essay is
a supremely successful answer to a question he poses near the outset:
‘[H]ow do we describe and explain processes, which cannot be
captured by the prevailing discourses on fugal construction building
up from subject-answer relations via exposition design to fugue as a
whole, but which are apparent under analysis?’ (45). Horton’s analyses
are far beyond the adroit resolution of the fugue’s tripartite structure
(his tables chart the topography of Bach’s combinative design with
surgical exactitude), and they probe ‘two parallel narratives’ (44)
which sometimes converge but which otherwise disclose what
Horton compellingly describes as a manifestation of non-congruent
counterpoint (47). One of these narratives is answerable to Bach’s
undoubted assent to the syntax of fugal discourse (the thematic
integrity of the principal subject as a contrapuntal governance in
particular), but the other (which reconsiders fugal discourse as an
inventive sequence of motivic derivations and even deviations from
the subject) is not. There is first the lapidary and grave stile antico subject
(and its attendant countersubjects) of the first fugue and then there
is the radical contrast of the second fugue (the motoric ebullience of
its instrumental invention), and finally there is the majestic stretto of
the third fugue in which the resolution of ‘non-congruent’ material
(including a ‘lament’ figure which affords a new plane of extramusical
signification) combines with an unnerving tension between
the first subject and the second countersubject as the drama reaches
its end. However differently this fugue has been formally construed
in the past (most conventionally, perhaps, as a triple fugue, which is
to say a single fugue on three subjects – a construal which Horton
plausibly rejects) 6 , this reading privileges the formative power of the
principal subject, not least in terms of the dissonances it occasions.
Horton shows that the harmonic incongruities these latter produce
are only resolved in the final cadence. I found myself completely
persuaded, moreover, by Horton’s hermeneutic interpretation of
this fugue, not least because it so effortlessly enhances the structural
intelligence of his own analysis. I will not disclose his extra-musical
6 I think that one could make a case for the C-sharp minor fugue as a double
fugue, but only a weak one, insofar as the final section comprises a stretto
maestrale on two subjects.
16
The Well-Tempered Festschrift
reading of Bach’s counterpoint here except to remark that it gives
‘narrative weight’ (64) to the fugue’s long-term harmonic strategies.
In this remarkable essay, the extremism of Bach’s counterpoint
enjoys a correlatively complex analysis of the composer’s striking
autonomy of musical discourse. The result deepens our historical
awareness of this autonomy.
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