Numbers, Numbers, Numbers....
Read any good books
lately? Several? My suspicion is that
none of them was called "Book number six in
English." It probably had a more imaginative
title, that, with any luck, gave you some idea
what the book was supposed to be about.
But the chances are
if you've heard anything by Mozart, Beethoven,
Brahms, or Corigliano (he's still alive, which
might explain we you didn't recognize him--if
you did, congratulations) you encountered just
such a generic title. "Symphony number 8 in F
Major" at first glance doesn't seem to tell us
a heck of a lot. It has all the style of
reading a novel called "novel" or a short
story called "short story."
And then they go and
stick a bunch of numbers on the end that make
it seem like you've wondered into the
non-fiction section of your local library.
So what's that all
about?
A title might tell us
something about the book we are going to read,
although it probably only gets us so far. The
title of a song with lyrics is usually the
first line of the chorus, which generally gets
repeated a lot. But the title of a musical
composition without words? Well, the book
title and the pop song with lyrics are works
which use the same language as their title. In
other words, the title is in English and so
are (some of) the contents. But a piece of
pure music? What should we call that? The one
that goes
You know,
that one.
Ok, so how about
telling us what the music is about? What it
describes. A sunrise, an emotion, a legend.
The problem here is that most instrumental
music wasn't specifically written to describe
anything. And there are some who think that
music practically ceases to be music the
moment it tries too hard to do those things.
So we're back to
naming a piece based on its type. Is it a
novel or a short story, a Symphony or a
Prelude? You see, each genre has a
tradition that has grown up around it and an
accepted set of rules--customs, really--that
tells the informed listener basically what to
expect when he first encounters a piece with a
particular title. A Symphony is generally a
work for large orchestra in several parts
(movements; usually 4) which, in the manner of
an essay, presents a handful of musical ideas,
and then develops them, concluding with a
repeat of the opening ideas. It is the musical
equivalent of a novel, generally lasting at
least half-an-hour. A prelude, on the other
hand, is a single piece (though composers
usually write sets of preludes) in a single
mood, usually for solo piano, and quite short,
usually only 2 or 3 minutes.
While there are
hundreds, thousands of individual pieces with
the same titles, getting acquainted with what
each title means simplifies things greatly.
There are billions of human beings, but we've
pretty much all got noses and fingers and
other strange protuberances. Haydn wrote 104
symphonies, but they mostly stick to the same
large-scale plan, with a few variants (after
listening to about 30 of them the variants
become quite welcome, actually!)
It's too bad this
system of generic titles and endless numbers
represents such an obstacle to people trying
to get to know this kind of music, but it
does, and worse, it seems pretentious. Some of
the best known titles in classical music have
nicknames which helps to make the piece stand
out or bring them down to earth, like the
"Moonlight" Sonata or the "Surprise" Symphony.
The composers themselves usually had nothing
to do with the nicknames, but it does seem to
make the pieces friendlier than if we referred
to the pieces as Sonata number 14 or Symphony
number 94.
So what is the deal
with these numbers? Well, like a lot of things
in music it what sounds complicated and
unfriendly to the layman is actually
ridiculously simple. The numbers are
simply a way of cataloguing a composer's
output, and they run, either in chronological
order of composition, publication, or some
other sequence, from 1 through whatever number
it takes to identify precisely everything the
composer wrote, or at least, got published.
The numbering system, however, is a bit
different in the case of the individual
composer.
Many
composer's works have the abbreviation op.
after the title. Op. is short for opus, which
means "work" and the opus number means the
publication number. The first thing the
composer ever got published is known as his
opus 1 and the numbers keep going until he
dies or retires.
Since, for
example, there is only one opus 3 you
can specifically refer to that one work, and
one work only. If a composer wrote a lot of
Symphonies, even a lot of Symphonies in the
same key (like Symphony in D Major) there is
still only one Symphony in D Major opus 3.
There may also be a Symphony in D Major opus
4. Some composers, like Haydn, wrote a
ridiculously large number of symphonies in D
Major, so we need to be pretty specific.
It is possible that
opus 3 might refer to a collection of pieces
all published together, and that we will
actually have to call it Symphony in D Major,
opus 3 number 6, as in the sixth item
published in that group. That sort of thing
tends to happen more with pre-nineteenth
century composers, who wrote quite a slew of
pieces by present-day standards, as if they
wanted to prove their facility with the quill
pen. (One catch: symphonies were shorter and
for fewer instruments, which is one reason
Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and Beethoven only
wrote 9!)
For composers from
Beethoven (1770-1827) and later, this approach
works pretty well. Opus numbers can tell us,
not only which exact piece we are talking
about, they can usually tell us whether the
composer was just starting out or had a few
grey hairs on him when the piece was written.
But "opus" refers to the order of publication,
not when the piece was written, so in a few
cases, a composer may have written the piece,
sat on it for a few years (for whatever
reason) and then published it quite late. Like
most systems, opus numbers can't tell us
everything.
Before
the publishing industry was on cruise control,
a composer like Mozart would have published
only a few of his works, so referring to them
by opus number is not very helpful,
particularly when most of his works don't have
one! This is where fellows like Koechel come
in. A mineralogist by profession, Koechel
spent years tracking down what he felt was
Mozart's exact order of composition. Koechel
numbered Mozart's works from 1 to 626, and
each work got its own number from the
smallest minuet (K 1)
Mozart wrote when he was four to the great
Requiem Mass still incomplete when he died at
the ripe old age of 35 (K 626). Referring to
Mozart's compositions by Koechel number not
only gives us the exact piece we have in mind,
we can tell how old Mozart was when he wrote
it, what other things he was working on at the
time, the circumstances of his life at the
time (which may give us a clue as to why he
wrote it) and so on.
Or can we? There has
been at least one major revision of the
Koechel catalogue. Musicological research has
leapt forward in the last century and
new methods of determining when a piece was
written have become available. Now these
musical sleuths can trace what kind of
manuscript paper Mozart was using at any given
time to a particular city or even music store,
sometimes merely by examining the watermarks
on the paper. (Fictitious Example: aha! So he
had to have written it DURING or AFTER his
trip to Somewherespeziel in the fall of 1785
because we can tell by the watermark that the
paper he was using came from Bob's
Not-so-Viennese Music Emporium which closed in
the spring of 1786 and we know Mozart was in
the area in October of 1785 and MIGHT HAVE
bought paper there for the opera which
premiered in 1787. He made another trip to the
city in the fall of 1786 but we've already
established that the store was closed by then
so he must have bought the paper in 1785 which
completely debunks my colleague's assertion
that the opera can be traced back to the
spring of 1785 because he didn't have the
manuscript paper on which it was written yet,
so there!) It can get pretty involved.
Some
researchers have thrown up their hands when it
comes to ordering a composer's catalogue
chronologically. Alfred Schmieder decided to
arrange J. S. Bach's works by type, without
worrying about when they were written. Thus
all of the church cantatas are given numbers
from 1 to 150. Most of the non-organ-related
keyboard music is up in the eight or nine
hundreds. Schmieder listings (S.) are
more commonly known as B. W. V. numbers (Bach
Werke Verzeichnis, or Edition of Bach's Works)
.
A fellow named Otto
Deutsch prepared a catalogue of the complete
works of Franz Schubert. These Deutsch
listings are also supposed to be in
chronological order of composition. Schubert
tended to write quickly and not make
revisions. His listed composition come close
to a thousand. Annoyingly, some publishers
only use opus numbers after Schubert
compositions, which does not give a very
complete picture since Schubert only published
a fraction of what he wrote. The Deutsch
listings are much more comprehensive.
There are cases where
more than one person has attempted a catalogue
of the same composer's works, and while one
usually gains standard usage (as Koechel's did
with Mozart), sometimes you will see two sets
of numbers after a piece's title. Such is the
case with Domenico
Scarlatti, whose sonatas were placed in
some attempt at chronological order (though it
is almost impossible to know for sure) by John
Kirkpatrick, and thus also have the
designation K. Before him, a man named
Longo numbered the works and came to many
different conclusions. For some reason,
neither system has become universally
accepted, which often leads to a nightmare of
numbers and certainly doesn't make them appear
more listener-friendly when listed by
conscientious concert-programmers.
In case musicologists
ever take these matters too seriously, the
works of our dear P. D. Q. Bach, said to be
the "last and least of the great J. S. Bach's
twenty odd children" have also received
catalogue numbers from their tireless
promoter, Peter Schickele, who, besides
presenting these outrageous works which
lampoon classical music and the snob culture
in general, also moonlights as a serious
composer. Schickele poses as the man
responsible for discovering and researching
his way through the works of the incompetent
and frequently drunk composer whom he profess
to so admire, and has presented each of the
works with its own Schickele number (which
makes it bear a suspicious resemblance to the
elder Bach's Schmeider numbers), many of which
contain fractions and exponents just in case
the public ever begins to think it has caught
on to the confusing parade of numbers after a
composer's works and they begin to lose their
incomprehensible charm.
|