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Conceiving Musical Transdialection

By Richard Beaudoin, Harvard University

and Joseph Moore, Amherst College

Abstract: We illuminate the wandering notion of a musical transcription by reflecting

on the various ways “transcription” and its cognates have been used in musical discourse,

and by examining some notable 20th century transcriptions of J. S. Bach, which became

increasingly loose through the decades. At root, musical transcription aims at preservation,

but, as we bring out, exactly which musical ingredients are preserved across which

transformations varies from transcriptional project to transcriptional project. We defend as

intelligible one very interesting such project—we call it “transdialection”—by exploring an

analogy with poetic translation, and by directly taking on some natural objections to it. We

conclude that certain controversial transcriptions are justifiably and usefully so-called.

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0. Transcription Traduced

While it may not surprise you to learn that the first bit of music above is the opening

of a chorale prelude by Baroque master, J. S. Bach, who would guess that the second bit is a

so-called transcription of it? But it is—it’s a transcription by the contemporary British

composer, Michael Finnissy. The two passages look very different from one another, even to

those of us who don’t read music. And hearing the pieces will do little to dispel the shock,

for here we have bits of music that seem worlds apart in their melodic makeup, harmonic

content and rhythmic complexity. It’s a far cry from Bach’s steady tonality to Finnissy’s

floating, tangled lines—a sonic texture in which, as one critic put it, real music is “mostly

thrown into a seething undigested, unimagined heap of dyslexic clusters of multiple key- and

time-proportions, as intricately enmeshed in the fetishism of the written notation as those

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with notes derived from number-magic.”1 We’re more sympathetic to Finnissy’s music. But

still, how can one maintain, as Finnissy does, that his music transcribes Bach’s? What

conceptual undertaking, and what art-historical trajectory can produce such a relationship

without straining the term “transcription” past its useful limits?

In this paper, we illuminate the wandering notion of musical transcription by

reflecting on the various ways “transcription” and its cognates have been used in musical

discourse (section 1). At root, musical transcription aims at preservation, though as we bring

out, exactly which musical ingredients are preserved across which transformations varies

from transcriptional project to transcriptional project. In fact, our primary goal is to uncover,

articulate, and endorse one very interesting such project—we call it “transdialection”—in

which a transcriber re-expresses a work’s musical content in a different musical dialect. We

sketch the emergence of this fruitful musical undertaking by examining some notable 20th

century Bach transcriptions, including Finnissy’s, which became increasingly loose through

the decades (section 2). We sharpen our understanding of this new species of transcription

by exploring an analogy with poetic translation (section 3), and by responding to several

objections (section 4). We conclude, among other things, that Finnissy’s transcription is

justifiably, and usefully so-called.

1. “Transcription” Traversed

The word “transcription” is used in several ways in musical discourse. It’s worth

introducing some terminology so that we can set apart the notion—“musical

transcription”—that we aim to illuminate, as well as to show how, at root, transcriptions in

all senses aim at preservation. “Notational transcription” is the process of re-notating a

1 Julian Silverman in (1996), p. 37.

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musical work—that is, of notating in a new form a previously notated work, as when a piece

written in tablature is transcribed to staff notation, or when a trumpet part in C is

transcribed to be played on a trumpet in B-flat. Notational transcription aims to preserve a

musical work across some difference in notational form, and it can be carried off without

actually listening to the work itself. “Ethnomusicological transcription” is the process of

writing down or notating music that is heard in live performance or on a recording. This

might be done in an effort to preserve the music of some culture or musician for

enthnomusicological study; but it might also be done for musical education, as when an

aspiring jazz musician transcribes an improvised solo from a recording.2

While notational transcription aims to preserve music across differences in notation,

and ethnomusicological transcription aims to preserve music in a notated form, what we call

“musical transcription” aims to preserve a musical work across some difference in musical

context. Just what differences can legitimately engage a project of musical transcription is the

central concern of this paper. But the paradigm case is the attempt to preserve a musical

work across a difference in performance-means, as when Busoni reset for the piano certain

chorale preludes that Bach composed for the church organ. Indeed, we will discuss this very

example in the next section, where we will also present examples suggesting that musical

transcription can aim to preserve a work across other differences, such as a difference in

“musical dialect.”

“Musical transcription” is an apt term for a distinct and distinguished musical

undertaking that has engaged many composers and arrangers. But the label shouldn’t imply,

of course, that notational and ethnomusicological transcriptions have nothing musical about

them. And it shouldn’t imply that all musical transcriptions go by this label. The musical 2 For more on ethnomusicological transcription, see Ellingson 2007, whence we derived the label. For more on transcription in the jazz tradition, see Tucker & Kernfeld 2007.

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undertaking we have in mind can go by other names—“arrangement,” “setting,”

“orchestration,” and “reduction” being the most common in English.3

Musical transcription is a highly circumscribed form of musical borrowing—a sort of

limit-case, in fact. J. Peter Burkholder usefully defines musical borrowing as the taking of

“something from an existing piece of music and using it in a new piece.” And he adds that

this “something may be anything, from a melody to a structural plan. But it must be

sufficiently individual to be identifiable as coming from this particular work, rather than

from a repertoire in general.”4 The musical transcriber can be regarded as a musical borrower

who takes on two additional constraints. First, she transcribes a specific, pre-existing work

(or a clearly delimited section of it, such as a movement) in its entirety and unembedded in a

3 We also don’t mean to imply that our taxonomy is exhaustive. In fact, there is at least one further use of the word “transcription”—we might call it “medial transcription”—in which we pick out the process of transferring music from one non-instrumental and relatively proximal source (such as a storage medium) to another, as in a “broadcast transcription” or a dubbing. (For more on this notion of transcription, see Rye 2007.) This additional sense of “transcription” bears on an intriguing question raised by our taxonomical framework: if notational transcription is the preservational mapping of notation to notation, musical transcription of sounds to sounds (or music to music), and ethnomusicological transcription of sounds to notation, then is there a sense of “transcription” that covers the preservational mapping of notation to sound? And if so, wouldn’t a transcription in this sense simply be a performance of a work? [Busoni seems to endorse this conception when he says… Look up passage as quoted in Ridley] But (pace Busoni) many of us hesitate to call performances “transcriptions”, and this is probably because, in addition to aiming at preservation, a transcription (in any sense) must involve writing. Indeed, the word “transcription” wears this second necessary condition on its etymological sleeve. (Of course, medial transcription doesn’t involve writing in any strict sense, but maybe it’s so-called because it aims to capture music in some encrypted and storable form—and encryption is “writing” in an extended sense.) Imagine, then, an archivist who comes across a faded and decaying manuscript of Bach’s. In order to preserve this long, lost work, our archivist might find it most efficient simply to play the work on a digital keyboard attached to a computer running some scroring software. A quasi-performance of this type might sensibly be called a transcription—a “performative transcription” perhaps. 4 Burkholder gives this definition on p. 863 of his pioneering article, “The Uses of Existing Music” (Burkholder 1994). He goes on to provide a tentative typology of musical borrowing, and urges further study of the field. We regard our paper as one response to Burkholder’s invitation.

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longer work.5 Second, she aims, in ways we’ll explore, to preserve this work across some

musical difference, and not merely to use it as material in some new, derivative work.

That there is a tenable and useful, even if intentional and vague, distinction between

the re-voicing or re-expression of a work and a mere appropriation of it is a central upshot

of our paper. For an example clearly on the far side of the distinction, consider Perotin’s,

Alleluia: Nativitas, written around 1200. In this organum, Perotin greatly elongates a

preexisting Gregorian chant and uses it as a bass, over which he composes two new, fast-

moving lines. The original music is obscured—at times, over sixty notes sound over a single

note of the borrowed chant. Since the preexisting music is used as a kind of hidden scansion

on which the new music rests, Perotin has here appropriated a monophonic chant, and

incorporated it as part of his new polyphonic work.6

Musical transcription, by contrast, has the more conservative goal of re-expressing

the content of the target work in a new musical context. And indeed, the phrase “re-

expression” suggests how musical transcription is, paradoxically, a sort of maximal form of

musical borrowing, and thereby nearly not a case at all. In musical transcription the original

work isn’t “borrowed” in the way one might borrow a hammer and some nails in order to

build a shed, or a theme in order to compose a set of variations upon it. The musical

5 Requiring in our definition that the transcribed work pre-exist ensures that later drafts in a compositional process don’t count as transcriptions of previous ones. (We get this point from Davies 1988, reprinted in 2003, p. ???.) Requiring the treatment of entire works, or clearly delimited sections thereof, marks off transcription from certain other forms of musical borrowing, such as theme and variation. And requiring that the transcribed material be unembedded rules out a sort of extended musical quotation in which a work is sandwiched between bits of new music thereby transforming the overall expressive content. 6 [Cut or move to treatment of an objection?] For a more modern, but also more fraught, example, consider the third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which has running through it the entire third movement from Mahler’s Second Symphony. Berio’s piece is not, in any sense, a transcription of Mahler, since Berio aimed not simply to re-express the content of Mahler’s piece, but rather to use Mahler’s movement as material in a new musical expression of his own.

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transcriber aims not to create an entirely new (even if derivative) musical work, but rather, as

it were, to re-deploy or re-voice the original work in a new context.

This explains some of our uneven descriptive tendencies. We don’t know, for

example, whether to count a transcription as a new (even if maximally derivative) work, and

we don’t know whether to count the transcriber as a co-composer of the result. This seems

to us to be largely a conventional or “merely semantic” matter: whether we give the

transcriber primary billing, or list him more secondarily as the “arranger” is largely a matter

of marketing.7

Musical transcription is not, however, an automatic, or merely technical process.

Transcriptions can be highly creative, as we’ll show in the next section, though the

transcriber’s creativity is balanced against—or better, played out within a guiding and

constraining fidelity to the original work. In negotiating this tension between authenticity

and originality the transcriber is, as Stephen Davies notes, like the performer: a good

transcription, like a good performance, is faithful to the parent work while also providing the

audience with something original. And like an interesting performance, what a good

transcription often provides is some sort of insight into the parent work:

A transcription cannot help but comment on the original in re-presenting the musical contents of the original, so a transcription invites reconsideration of and comparison with the original. Rather than being valued merely for making the musical contents of their models more accessible, transcriptions are also valued for enriching our understanding and appreciation of the merits (and demerits) of their models. (Davies 2003, p. 53)

7 This conventionalism would follow from the view (defended in Moore MS) that musical works are “individuatively indeterminate.” Fortunately, however, our treatment of musical transcriptions doesn’t depend upon this or any other view about the contested individuation of musical works. We do say a bit more about the conceptual indeterminacy in this realm when we discuss the notion of musical content in section 4 below. However, we’re content to play fast and loose in the main text (and in our quotes from others) with the individuative relation between the work transcribed and the transcription of it.

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Expanding on Davies’s observation, Paul Thom has recently argued that, in this

capacity, transcription can be viewed as a form of non-critical interpretation: while the music

critic might say something about a work’s meaning or content, the transcriber (and also the

performer and the composer of variations on a theme) can show it. This interpretative

function has, we think, become more prominent as the invention and wide distribution of

musical recordings have increasingly obviated the transcriber’s traditional task of simply

making a work more widely accessible (by transcribing it for performance on the living room

piano, for example).8 (A similar shift occurred in painting, where a rise in abstraction was

concurrent with the onset of photography.9) In fact, this shift in function would help explain

the emergence, in the 20th century, of a new, “trans-dialectical” form of transcription.

2. Bach Transcribed

We turn now to five 20th century transcriptions of contrapuntal works (three chorale

preludes and one fugue) by J. S. Bach.10 We show in some detail why we think these

transcriptions, which span the entire century (1907-1992), reflect the emergence of musical

“transdialection.”

8 Along with making a work more accessible and providing an interpretation of it, Davies notes that transcriptions have also played a role in musical pedagogy and in providing a vehicle for a composer to show off his compositional skill. Since it seems to us that this last function is achieved by carrying out one of the others, and since pedagogy is not at play in the transcriptions we’ll discuss, it’s only the first two functions—increasing accessibility and providing interpretation—that will be at play in our discussion. 9 This is true even within portraiture, where Gustav Klimt, for example, surrounds a realistic representation of the face—the ‘core’ of the portrait—with material that is much less representational. For more on the analogy with portraiture see Davies 2003, p. ???. 10 Although the Bach originals all involve significant musical borrowing—the chorale preludes include pre-existing Lutheran melody as cantus firmi, while the fugue is based on a theme given to Bach by King Frederick the Great of Prussia—none are themselves transcriptions.

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TRANSCRIPTION No. 1: Bach–Busoni

Bach Original: Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, heiliger Geist, BWV 667, ca. 1708–09

Busoni Transcription: “Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, heiliger Geist” from 10 Chorale Preludes, original organ works by J. S. Bach “Transcribed for the piano in chamber style” by Ferruccio Busoni, 1907–09

Busoni’s transcription rather straightforwardly transfers Bach’s original organ music

to the modern piano. In order to do this, however, Busoni employs some artful

constructions of his own. In his score, Bach directs the organist to perform organo pleno—that

is, to use the full complement of pipes, or ‘pull out all the stops’. Busoni, in an attempt to

imitate the octave-rich organ pleno sound, fills his transcription with numerous octaves that

are not present in Bach’s score. In effect, Busoni maximizes the timbre of the piano, just as

Bach calls for ‘pulling out all the stops’ on the organ.

Bach’s original asks the organ to read three staves of music at once: one for the left

hand, one for the right hand, and one for the pedals, operated by the feet. It would have

been easy and obvious for Busoni to reduce the three staves of the organ music into a

simplified version for piano written on two staves. However, Busoni, capturing the technical

complexity of the original, ingeniously maintains a three-staved texture, with a stave for the

left hand, a stave for the right hand, and a middle stave that uses both hands in alternation.

In doing so, he preserves the technical challenge of the original across instruments.

What Busoni has not changed in his transcription is the fundamental harmonic or

melodic content of Bach’s original. As a result, the overall tone of Bach’s chorale prelude,

and indeed of the exalted plainchant on which it is based—‘Come, Creator, Spirit blessed!’—

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is preserved in Busoni’s transcription. And Busoni has changed the music only in an effort

to preserve across instruments the experience of playing and hearing Bach’s work.11

TRANSCRIPTION No. 2: Bach–Schoenberg

Bach Original: Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, heiliger Geist, by J.S. Bach, BWV 667, ca. 1708–09

Schoenberg Transcription: Komm, Gott Schöpfer, heiliger Geist: Choralvorspiel von Joh. Seb. Bach, Instrumentiert von (“orchestrated by”) Arnold Schoenberg, 1922

In 1922, Arnold Schoenberg, the great ‘emancipator of dissonance’, orchestrated the

very same chorale prelude. Schoenberg’s transcription is in many ways akin to Busoni’s: it

preserves the melodic and harmonic content of Bach’s original. What is radically changed in

the Schoenberg is the timbre, or musical color, of each line of counterpoint.

Notwithstanding the talents and ingenuity of the performers, both Bach’s original organ

work and Busoni’s piano transcription of it maintain a rather continuous timbre throughout

their range. By contrast, the symphony orchestra is capable of a seemingly infinite array of

timbres, all of which can change on a dime. So while Schoenberg’s handling of Bach’s

material is harmonically and melodically respectful—26 measures in each, with the original

music recognizable throughout—the array of orchestral colors alters the timbral profile

dramatically. Alongside the audible differences, there is, of course, a striking physical

difference: in live performance Bach’s organ work is performed by one individual, usually

11 A non-preservational exception is Busoni’s elimination of the fermata in the second measure. (A fermata marking instructs the musician to pause and hold the chord under which it appears.) Fermatas appear in Bach’s chorale prelude because they mark the phrase endings of the original plainchant on which the piece is based; they are a remnant of a text that is no longer present. Though a small change graphically, in performance there is a marked difference: in Bach the musical flow is repeatedly interrupted (there are three such fermatas in the first seven measures), while in Busoni the music proceeds without interruption. So, while Busoni’s transcription is utterly faithful to Bach’s musical language, it makes certain slight alterations to the musical progress.

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hidden in a church organ loft, whereas Schoenberg’s orchestration calls for over 80

musicians led by a conductor.

Schoenberg’s transcription is largely, though not entirely, faithful to Bach’s original

notes. At one point in Bach’s original, a long, sustained C is held in the highest and lowest

voices of the organ.12 Schoenberg, likely wanting to add emphasis and energy to Bach’s

sustained octave, dresses up the measure with a rising, scalar flourish to a higher octave C in

the orchestral strings. Thus the scalar run emphasizes and amplifies the same note, C, that

was already sounding in Bach’s original. Schoenberg, like Busoni before him, treats Bach’s

melodic and harmonic details with reverence, while altering the timbre and adding minor

emphases on some of the original pitches. Here too the intent is to transfer the work as

expressed in Bach’s musical language to a different means of performance—in this case, the

symphony orchestra.

TRANSCRIPTION No. 3: Bach–Webern Bach Original: Fugue (Ricercare) a 6 from Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079, 1747 Webern Transcription: Fugue (Ricercare) a 6 from Das Musikalische Opfer, arranged for

orchestra by Anton Webern in 1934-35

Webern’s notorious orchestral transcription of Bach’s 6-part Ricercar from The

Musical Offering moves subtly away from the more traditional transcriptions of Busoni and

Schoenberg. Webern’s conceptual leap is not to add or remove Bach’s notes or rhythms—

they are all faithfully preserved. Rather, it is to break up Bach’s long contrapuntal melodies

into small units, distributing each melody among several different instruments. The

technique, devised, in fact, by Schoenberg, Webern’s teacher, is called Klangfarbenmelodie (or

12 This can be seen in measure 15 of Schoenberg’s orchestral score.

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tone-color melody). For example, the first 20 notes of Bach’s fugue theme would originally

be played by a single instrument.13 In Webern’s orchestral transcription, the first five notes

are played by the trombone, the next two by the horn, then two by the trumpet, two by the

horn with harp, dovetailing into four by the trombone, and so on.

Webern’s transcription is kaleidoscopic. Bach’s original lines are all present and

accounted for, but each is ‘sung’ by a unpredictable and ever-changing orchestral voice.

Moreover, Webern’s coloristic choices foreground many short motives that are not heard as

such in the continuity of Bach’s original. Since much of Webern’s own mature music is made

up of similar tiny motivic cells, his transcription a kind of ‘Webernization’ of a Bach piece.

Nevertheless, while Webern’s fragmentation and often lush 20th-century colors seem poised

to break away into dodecaphonic variations, those familiar with both works will hear the

Webern as a faithful re-expression of Bach’s work, though its extreme timbral discontinuities

point the way towards transcriptions that are even looser musically.14

TRANSCRIPTION No. 4: Bach–Stravinsky Bach Original: Einige canonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied: “Von himmel hoch da

komm’ ich her” vor die Orgel mit 2 Clavieren und dem Pedal, BWV 769, 1746–47 Stravinsky Transcription: J. S. Bach: Choral-Variationen über das Weihnachtslied Von Himmel

hoch da komm’ ich her Komm Gesetzt von (“set by”) Igor Stravinsky for mixed chorus and ensemble in 1955–56

13 As it happens, the 6-part Ricercare is rather unique in Bach’s work, since he wrote it in ‘open score’, meaning that no exact instruments were specified. 14 In his 1989 transcription of Liszt’s Wiegenlied, John Adams pushes things just about as far as Webern. Malcolm Miller writes that “from the outset, in John Adams’ arrangement, a ‘minimalist’ interpretation is evident in the subtle differentiation of [Liszt’s] melodic and accompanimental strands, which intensifies the element of rhythmic syncopation” (Miller 1990, p. 24). Since ‘rhythimic syncopation’ is a defining element of minimalism, Adams re-expresses Liszt through his dialect of syncopation just as Webern re-voices Bach through his technique of Klangfarbenmelodie.

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Stravinsky’s transcription of Bach’s canonic variations on “Von himmel hoch da

komm’ ich her” marks an important departure from the musically faithful transcriptions

cited above. Stravinsky reproduces all of Bach’s notes and rhythms, but then adds some that

are all his own. These additional notes are foreign not only to Bach’s original prelude, but

also to Bach’s musical language. In fact, they create chords that are quintessentially

Stravinskian.

The clearest example occurs in Stravinsky’s setting of Bach’s Variation III. Early on,

Stravinsky adds notes that echo Bach’s chorale melody, but at an interval (minor sevenths

above and below) that creates a line foreign to Bach’s original. The added pitches form new

harmonic collections (so-called “0257 collections” such as C-D-F-G) that are completely

absent not only from Bach’s original chorale prelude, but from his compositional language as

well. Music theorist Joseph Straus nicely summarizes the relationship: “Stravinsky’s added

lines do not conform to the prevailing harmonic logic of Bach’s original…The harmonies

formed by the lines are no longer triadic, but consistently create a small number of non-

triadic sets, particularly the tetrachords 0247 and 0257…which are principal motives of

[Stravinsky’s great neoclassical ballet] Pulcinella as well. In this sense, the lines are regulated to

each other, but on Stravinsky’s terms, not Bach’s.” (Straus 1986, pp. 320–323)15

Stravinsky intentionally moves here beyond the transcriber’s traditional goal of

remaining as faithful as possible to the musical notes and language of the original while

15 Writing about his use of music from the past to express himself in Pulcinella (1920), Stravinsky wrote: “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too. No critic understood this at the time, and I was therefore attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing ‘simple’ music, blamed for deserting ‘modernism’, accused of renouncing my ‘true Russian heritage’. People who had never heard of, or even cared about, the originals cried ‘sacrilege’; ‘The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone.’ To them all, my answer was and is the same: You respect, but I love.” (Stravinsky & Kraft 1962, pp. 113–4).

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adjusting to some differences in performance-means. He strives instead to preserve the

work’s musical content across a difference in musical language—a dialect he himself created

in his neoclassic period. But as we see it, Stravinsky does not, in his work, build new musical

content upon music he’s borrowed from Bach. Rather, he provides a musical language—or

at least a palette of harmonic and timbral sensitivities—within which he endeavors to re-

expresses the content of Bach’s original music. Stravinsky doesn’t say something new; he

says in his own way what Bach previously said in his, and he thereby reveals something

about the original work.

The passage we just discussed illuminates the point. The original chorale melody in

Bach’s organ work is written as an inner-voice, surrounded above and below by other faster-

moving lines of counterpoint. Stravinsky’s transcription foregrounds Bach’s inner part in

two ways: first, he scores the line for human voices, which always brings prominence;

second, he uses brass instruments to echo the chorale melody in minor sevenths. This is

particularly elegant, since it is the “Stravinskian” additions that highlight and foreground an

otherwise backgrounded element of Bach’s original counterpoint.

For these reasons, we regard Stravinsky’s transcription as an example (though not the

first, to be sure) of what we call “trans-dialectical transcription” or, more simply,

“transdialection”. The goal in this species of transcription is to preserve the content of a

musical work not exclusively across a difference in performance-means, but across a

difference in musical language. Transdialection aims, that is, to re-voice or re-express the

original in a different musical dialect.

TRANSCRIPTION No. 5: Bach–Finnissy Bach Original: Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein, by J.S. Bach, BWV 668a, 1750

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Finnissy Transcription: Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sind, by Michael Finnissy, “based on the Chorale-Prelude by J. S. Bach BWV 668”, written for piano in 1992.

We now turn to the example that opened our paper, Michael Finnissy’s transcription

of Bach’s ‘deathbed chorale’, so-called because Bach may have dictated the piece to a

colleague during his final days of life.16 If Stravinsky crossed a conceptual threshold hinted at

by Webern, then Finnissy tramples that threshold, and runs a good deal further for good

measure. For in Finnissy’s transcription the Bach original is now increasingly difficult to

perceive, both aurally and graphically.

Amidst the many alterations, Finnissy’s piece generally maintains a through-line that

follows Bach’s counterpoint from beginning to end, but in almost all cases their rhythms,

pitches, and location of the voices are distorted. To complicate matters further, Finnissy

adds some surrounding material, including other superimposed melodies from Bach’s

original, and melodies from Alban Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto.17 Finnissy’s use of Bach’s

chorale prelude seems a direct challenge to the traditional notion of transcription, as Bach’s

original is often at the brink of perceptibility. But then why should we continue to regard

Finnissy’s project as transcription?

It seems to us that, despite the significant musical alterations, Finnissy’s fundamental

aim is to remain faithful to Bach—to re-express the musical content of Bach’s original in

Finnissy’s own 20th century musical language. This can be seen in the score and heard in

performance. If we’re right, Finnissy’s use of transcription to re-voice an earlier work is

further along the same transdialectical continuum as Stravinsky. It is only a short conceptual

step from Stravinsky’s overlaying Bach with modern-sounding dissonances to Finnissy’s

16 For a complete summary of the complex heritage of this attribution, see Yearsley 2002. 17 Berg’s elegiac work was written on the tragic death of Manon Gropuis, the daughter of renowned architect Walter Gropuis and Mahler’s ex-wife, Alma Mahler. In it, Berg famously quotes a Bach chorale, Es ist Genug (‘It is enough’).

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distorting and covering Bach with so much dissonance that the original’s music—but not its

expressive content—becomes obscured.

Drawing and hearing transdialectical connections between Bach’s original and

Finnissy’s transcription of it requires more than a casual listening and a passing glance at the

scores. But as the shared titles suggest,18 there are many, solid, transdialectical connections.

We will briefly describe three examples—mood, texture, and relative historical complexity.

Bach’s score specifies no tempo marking or performance indications, but however

it’s performed, the piece is profoundly melancholic: its contrapuntal unfolding is steadfast,

lacking any obvious climax point, or shift in dynamics. The same can be said of Finnissy’s

transcription: his tempo marking reads Legatissimmo, sostenuto, intimamente (very connected,

sustained, very intimate), while his dynamic never rises above pianississimo (extremely quiet).

Though Finnissy shifts the position of Bach’s lines and confounds their tonal logic, they

nevertheless maintain a mood of calm, contrapuntal rumination.

In addition to mood, the Bach and the Finnissy also share musical texture. Both

pieces exhibit a pattern of four-voice counterpoint that winnows to a single voice, then

works its way back to four voices, and oscillates back again. In both, the simultaneous

deployment of various lines inhibits the dominance of any single melody. Had Finnissy used

Bach’s material to write, for example, a non-contrapuntal samba, it could hardly be claimed

that he was ‘re-expressing’ Bach’s original work.19

Finally, Finnissy’s transcription inhabits a similar position with regards to his own

contemporary musical environment as Bach’s did to his. Bach’s deathbed chorale is a work

18 [Add footnote about the difference in their titles (Finnissy’s is an altered clause), and that Finnissy’s score ends with the words “based on the Chorale-Prelude by J. S. Bach BWV 668”] 19 For an extended discussion of Finnissy’s derivations and distortions of Bach in this work see Beaudoin (MS).

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of extreme contrapuntal complexity: written in 1750, this four-part chorale prelude stood at

the pinnacle of a learned practice that had already gone out of fashion. It features vorimitation

(a technique for foreshadowing the chorale melody), augmentation (whereby certain lines of

counterpoint reappear in doubled note-values), and inversion (whereby a line of

counterpoint is answered by an upside-down version of itself). Such contrapuntal techniques

were considered antiquated when the work was composed. The times then favored the less

contrapuntally-complex Galant style, exemplified by composers such as Bach’s son Johann

Christian Bach (1735-1782), in which a well-defined melody with a supportive bass was the

norm.

The contrapuntal fabric of Finnissy’s work—with each hand playing multiple voices

and virtually no sense of prevailing meter—strikes one as cryptic, in just the way that Bach’s

four-part chorale prelude might have struck his own Galant contemporaries. Only a handful

of composers currently write music with this level of rhythmic complexity. And the

profoundly atonal harmonies and dissipating, non-cadential phrases diverge from the

prevailing pop, mimimalism, and more overtly ‘tuneful’ musical landscape of modern Britain,

where Finnissy lives and works. The work’s opening chord (B, C, E-flat, F-sharp, G) has no

place within common tonal practice, and includes a level of dissonance not often found

outside of high modernist or avant-garde circles in the late 20th century.

Finnissy preserves these significant musical similarities despite—or better, because of

the striking musical differences we noted at the outset. To see how why this might be so it’s

useful to consider what Finnissy himself has said about some of his own transcriptions.

Concerning the piece at hand, Finnissy writes:

Layered fragments of Bach's chorale-prelude (BWV 668) surface throughout, but no consistent 'tonality' is suggested as a context. The constituent measures of the original are constantly melting away, refracted through varying intervals of transposition, undermining any sense of rational 'perspective'. Bach reportedly

18

wrote his second setting of Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sein on his deathbed. The character of this palimpsest is also coloured by Berg's Violin Concerto - his dramatic, and morbidly sensual use of the chorale Es ist genug, creating a dialectic between diatonic and chromatic tonalities, and their attendant historico-cultural resonances. (Finnissy 2003)

Finnissy’s expressed goal of undermining tonality and “rational perspective” in his

transcription might seem to conflict with the preservational aspirations of the transcriber.

But consider how Finnissy describes another of his transcriptions—this time of Verdi (Verdi

Transcription No.10 ('Me pellegrina ed orfana', 1986-88)):

I worked from an earlier transcription by Alexander Abercrombie, generally increasing the harmonic ambiguity, eliding the original phrases, re-voicing Verdi's (orchestral) texture, creating a kind of production of the scene in my imagination. (op. cit.)

Here the move away from a determinate “perspective”—or at least towards greater

harmonic ambiguity—is presented less as an attempt to undermine the original, and more as

a way of imaginatively re-staging the original in Finnissy’s own musical language. The point

to recognize is that Finnissy’s general musical style traffics in the overlaying, the clashing,

and the ultimate destruction of fixed perspective—an expressive voice not entirely foreign to

contemporary artists. So, the “perspective-denying” features of the music properly

characterize the musical language within which Finnissy endeavors to re-express Bach’s

work.20

20 In some cases, ‘perspective-denying’ features are added for reasons of copyright, such as in John Cage’s 1969 piece, Cheap Imitation. Cage set out to traditionally transcribe Erik Satie’s Socrate to accompany a dance performance given by his colleague Merce Cunningham. When the French publisher forbade him to use Satie’s music because of copyright, Cage responded by transcribing the Satie in such a way that preserved Satie’s rhythms, but which changed the pitches according to a process involving chance operations. Since the use of chance operations is an integral part of Cage’s style, his transcription re-expresses the Satie through Cage’s compositional dialect. (Cage’s title, Cheap Imitation, is emblematic of his serio-comic artistic approach.)

19

This picture of Finnissy’s project is broadened in what he writes about his

transcription of Strauss’s O, schöner Mai ('O beautiful May' - from Strauss-Walzer

1967/1989):

In 'writing through or across' (trans-scribing) one is responding - in dialogue - to an 'other', rather than originating in isolation - as a monologue. This responding then draws quite close to performance…and begs the question of where the interface between text and interpretation lies. This 'interpretation' of Strauss also recollects previous rampantly chromatic derangements by Tausig and Godowsky. It also subverts, by cutting up (a device learned from William Burroughs), the original harmonic progressions, frustrating and denying their 'logic'. (op. cit.)

Finnissy’s language concerning transcription defies fixed interpretation. He variously

describes transcription as ‘interpretation’, ‘subversion’, ‘dialogue’, and ‘refraction’, all of

which are certainly brought to bear in his work. In the score of Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen

sind, he refers to the piece as a ‘palimpsest’. None of these varied terms confounds our

conclusion that the piece belongs in a discussion of transcription, in part because much of

Finnissy’s oeuvre is involved with transcription, even within pieces that don’t acknowledge

the source work.

Finally, Finnissy’s bold attempt to re-deploy Bach’s work is successful as a

transdialection precisely because of the insight it gives into Bach’s original. The numerous

stepwise motives in Finnissy’s transcription clearly recapitulate Bach’s contrapuntal voices,

but Finnissy’s freely atonal language allows us to hear them anew, accentuating the

poignancy of the title, “When we are in the deepest need”. Despite—or, as we’ve claimed,

because—of Finnissy’s acknowledged attempt to ‘frustrate and deny the logic’ of Bach’s

original, Wenn wir in höchsten Nöthen sind seems to us to be just a more developed instance of

the new form of the transcription glimpsed in Webern, and ventured by Stravinsky.

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3. Transdialection Translated

If we’re right, a new musical undertaking—transdialection—has begun to emerge

from a more traditional, trans-instrumental form of musical transcription. There are several

reasons this may have happened when it did. One is simply the 20th century’s increasingly

intensified thirst for new artistic forms. But there is also the shift in function mentioned in

section 1. Since we can now hear a recording of the original with a click of the mouse, the

need simply to access the work no longer creates much of a demand for traditional, trans-

instrumental transcription.21 This would understandably lead transcribers to experiment with

different transformations as a way of carrying out the now heightened function of providing

new interpretative perspectives. But the functional shift also foregrounds a different type of

accessibility: transdialection can serve to make the musical content of the original accessible

to an audience whose musical dialect has different expressive sensitivities. Although we may

have recordings available to us, and although our powers of musical discrimination may be

just as refined as any citizen of 18th century Leipzig, Bach’s expressive content may

nevertheless be difficult for us to access because of a dialectical difference in the way musical

features map onto expressive ones.22

To appreciate this point, consider an analogy with poetic translation—an analogy the

word ‘transdialection’ wears on its sleeve. Our capacity to understand music that is very

foreign to us will be limited until we spend time accommodating to the culturally different

musical fabric in which it is created and expressed. Whether we regard this difference in

“musical fabric” as a difference in musical language or merely in dialect may well be 21 However, traditional transcriptions are still useful for pedagogical reasons—e.g., simplified versions for student performers, and as exercises for aspiring composers, including would-be transdialectors! 22 For an example of the way musical transcription can be used to make Bach accessible to a contemporary audience, consider the recordings of Béla Fleck & the Flecktones—for example, Bach Fugue No. 2, from The Hidden Land.

21

indeterminate and vague, depending as it does upon the type and degree of our musical

understanding. However, for most music that hits our ears, we can access at least some

central expressive features. Certainly those surrounded by Western popular music can listen

to J. S. Bach with a modicum of musical understanding. So, in most cases, the musical

transformation we’ve highlighted is best thought of as crossing musical dialects, not

languages. It’s for this reason that we’ve appropriated a term that’s been used to refer to the

intra-linguistic translation of literature.

In fact, the term ‘transdialection’ is as rare23 as the practice it names. And for good

reason: we usually think it sufficiently valuable, and find it relatively easy, to learn enough of

a different dialect in order to read an original work as is. But this norm isn’t always in place:

it might be important to make the original accessible to those who can’t or won’t cross a

dialectical divide; and we might also think that doing so sheds illuminating light on the

original. And so there are modern-English transdialections of the King James Bible, for

example, and attempts to update Shakespeare.24

But musical transdialection also trades in strict fidelity to notes and rhythms for re-

expression of a deeper sort. And although intra-linguistic translation of any type is rare,

certain inter-linguistic translations have certainly had the analogous goal of re-expressing a

piece of literature not merely in the words of a different language, but in the mind-set of a

different age. Among the many trade-offs a translator needs to make is one of purpose: is

the translation to serve simply to make the original accessible to someone who can’t speak

the original language, or might it also serve to re-express the original along some other

dimension? A looser translation which sheds light on the original by bringing to the fore one 23 So rare in fact that we thought we coined it. But the Oxford English Dictionary shows the term used as early as 1698, and in 1776 by the English music historian, Charles Burney. 24 See lfnexus.com/weareforanewtransdialectionofthekingjamesversionofthebible.htm and www.csulb.edu/~richmond/Shakespeare.html respectively.

22

of its hidden aspects, or by re-expressing it against contemporary sensibilities is more to the

point when the target audience knows at least some of the original language.

This was more common in previous eras. As Peter Green notes in the preface to his

new translations of Catullus, “from the Renaissance to comparatively recent times, literary

(as opposed to informational) translations have almost always had as their target other

scholars and men of letters who knew the original language, and who would thus appreciate

elegant pastiche. (Green 2005, p. 25; Green’s italics). For articulating the typical aim for such

“literary translations” Green cites John Dryden, who “justified his extensive Anglicization of

whatever ancient poet he tackled on the grounds that “my own [version] is of a piece with

his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have

written”” (Green’s emphasis) Exactly the same conception, articulated in much the same

counterfactual, guided Robert Lowell when, three centuries after Dryden, he undertook a

book of translations he called Imitations:

Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment. I have tried to write alive English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America. (Lowell 2003, p. 195; preface to Imitations (1961))

Of course, Dryden and Lowell articulate just one conception that might guide a

project of poetic translation. We might debate the merit or utility of such “imitations” on a

given occasion: for a bi-lingual audience it is only “literary” translations of this type that will

be of any value25; but for other audiences a stricter, more “informational” translation may be

25 Interested readers might compare Rilke’s Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906 with Stephen Mitchell’s fine 1982 English translation with Lowell’s 1961 ‘imitation’. German-English bilinguals might have little use for Mitchell’s elegant ‘straight’ translation, while remaining intrigued by Lowell’s free re-voicing. The latter poet’s own confessional and self-critical style comes through, and it is perhaps fitting that Lowell removes Rilke’s ‘1906’ from his title.

23

called for. In any case, the Dryden–Lowell conception seems exactly that which drives the

transdialector, whose audience can more and more readily access the originals. And so it is

useful to regard musical transdialection as an intra-linguistic and musical analogue to the

inter-linguistic projects of literary translation in which Dryden, Lowell and many others have

engaged.

4. Transdialection Defended

We conclude by responding to a pair of objections—one about the intelligibility of

transdialection, and a second about its applicability. The first worry is conceptual: the notion

of transdialection assumes that there is something that can be re-composed or re-expressed;

but what is this “thing”? We’ve talked about the preservation of a work’s “musical content”.

But what is this exactly?

This first thing to note is that this worry doesn’t apply uniquely to our notion of

transdialection; it applies to any notion of transcription, including the more traditional trans-

instrumental variety. Not only do most theoretical treatments of traditional transcription

speak explicitly about musical content and its cognates,26 but it seems to us that the

traditional transcriber is implicitly guided in his choices by a sense of something more stable

and, dare we say, deeper than the sheer notes of the original. So, the first objection

undermines our notion of transdialection only in so far as it undermines the intelligibility of

the well-established practice of transcription generally.

Still, it would be nice to say more. But alas, we don’t have a theory of musical

content to offer. In fact, we’re sympathetic to the possibility that this term (and this notion)

shifts its semantic focus along with the diverse aims and standards of our musical discourse.

26 [fn. to Davies, Thom, Straus, Scruton, Busoni?]

24

And so, the notion of musical content may not get at anything fixed.27 Perhaps talk of a

work’s musical content arises from (and is sustained by) a sort of semantic pretense that

composers, performers, listeners and music writers implicitly and collectively engage in.

Perhaps it’s useful shorthand, like our reifying talk of the “average American couple” with

1.7 children. (And live where—Springfield?) When semantic push comes to metaphysical

shove, it may be that our talk of musical content is subtly misguided: it purports to get

determinately at something fixed and precise, while it is actually activated in a more rough

and ready way by shifting clusters of a work’s aesthetically relevant properties.28

But even if our notion of musical content is looser and more unsettled than it seems,

it’s sufficiently constrained, even if we can’t explicitly say quite how, to play a useful role in

our thought and talk about music. And crucial for us: we often make clear and justified

judgments about when a transcription has succeeded—or at least about which features of

the original piece have been preserved, and to what extent. And the claim that our notion of

musical content is sufficiently robust in this way is, we submit, all that is needed to sustain

any notions of transcription built upon it.

[Add? A response to the objection that we don’t have a clean distinction between

transdialection and musical borrowing on the far-side—e.g., musical homage and pastiche.]

The second worry is more empirical: even if transdialection is intelligible in principle,

is it clear that Stravinsky, Finnissy, or anyone else has really engaged in it? We think so,

though our discussion of their transcriptions has been too brief to be conclusive. There are a

number of interesting issues that bear on a more complete defense. Before we elaborate,

27 Moore (MS) argues for a similar (and connected) view of musical works. 28 This picture predicts that “musical content” might be occasionally vague in application, and that this vagueness would ramify to concepts, such as that of a musical transcription, that are built upon it. But this would nicely explain some difficulties we might have in determining whether or not certain border-line musical undertakings count as transcriptions.

25

however, note that the notion of transdialection is, at the very least, a useful interpretative

lens through which to explore modern re-compositions precisely because it raises these

fruitful issues. For us, this vindicates the notion, even if we’re wrong about the examples

we’ve discussed.29

We suggested in section 1 that musical transcription of any stripe is both an

intentional and a normative notion. In saying that musical transcription is intentional, we

mean that the transcriber must intend to preserve the original work across some difference

in musical context.30 This intentional condition is necessary but not sufficient, however, since

a would-be transcriber might fail to pull it off. So transcription is also a normative, “success-

notion”—the musical details also matter. Whether or not the constructions of Webern,

Stravinsky and Finnissy count as transdialections depends, then, upon whether they satisfy

these two conditions in turn.

So did our transcribers really intend their constructions as transdialections? Here

self-descriptions, like the ones we quoted, are relevant, though it’s always possible for an

artist to “play off” a genre. Finnissy’s self-descriptions, for example, are highly nuanced, and

it’s possible that his project merely starts with transdialection and builds upon, or perhaps

against it. 29 We also think our notion of transdialection has many interesting conceptual connections with other musical undertakings, both within and without the classical tradition. One notable connection, which we hope to explore in future work, is with the notion of a “cover” in rock, jazz, and other popular idioms. To elaborate with just one example, Joe Cocker’s cover of the Beatle’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” seems simultaneously to be both a performance of the Beatle’s song, and also a distinctive version of it. (Musicians might deliberate about whose version to perform.) In the latter capacity, Cocker’s cover seems to us to be a transdialection of the Beatle’s original: it’s a re-expression, in Cocker’s distinctively expressive musical dialect that, among other things, provides an interesting and informative non-critical interpretation of the original. 30 We recognize that the shared notion of transcription not surprisingly exhibits some indeterminacy, which might allow us to label as a “transcription” something that wasn’t intended as such. We think the intentional condition is fairly central to the notion, but dropping it would, as far as we can see, only strengthen our empirical claims.

26

It’s also possible for an artist, like anyone else, to hide his real intentions from the

public, or even from himself. Joseph Straus has argued that these very re-compositions of

Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern were not “undertaken in the spirit of homage, the

generous recognition by one master of the greatness of an earlier master. The internal

evidence of the pieces, on the contrary, suggests a vigorous and self-aggrandizing struggle on

the part of the later composer to assert his priority over his predecessor, to prove himself the

stronger”. (Straus 1986, p. 327). If Straus is right, his claim would hold despite any public or

even private proclamations these composers might have made.

What then of our second condition: intentions aside, did our transcribers succeed in

transdialecting Bach? This question embroils us, of course, in the vagaries of musical content

that we touched on above: just which musical details are relevant might be indeterminate and

shift with explanatory context. But as we suggested, this complexity is not all-encompassing,

since we’re capable of judging determinate success and failure in many cases.31 Still, pursuing

the question further would involve an extended musical discussion.

We think we’ve given at least some solid musical evidence that Webern, Stravinsky

and Finnissy succeeded in transdialecting Bach. More importantly though, we take ourselves

to have opened up a new hermeneutic possibility: with transdialection as a theoretical

possibility, musical details that might otherwise point, for example, to what Straus regards as

content-destroying one-up-manship on the part of our 20th century composers can be

understood instead as manifesting various projects of transdialection.32 In any case, we

31 Notice that Straus presupposes the possibility that musical content can determinately not be maintained, since he argues, in effect, that it isn’t maintained in the re-compositions in question. So Straus is committed to the intelligibility of transdialection, even if he’s right that it wasn’t carried out where we claim it was. 32 [Fn Davies on Pulcinella?]

27

submit that for both music theorists and philosophers trying to understand our transcriptive

practice the notion of transdialection is squarely in play.

We don’t mean our conclusion to be merely descriptive: we hope that, once

transdialection is explicitly seen as a distinct and entirely legitimate musical undertaking, it

will be even more widely practiced, in and across a variety of musical traditions and dialects.

For transdialection seems a fruitful way of engaging music across wide differences in musical

context—a way not only of making more readily, and differently accessible the musical

content of works in distant musical dialects, but also of creatively shedding new

interpretative light on them.

28

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D. Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).