Shadows of meaning: Webern's Piano Variations on record

音乐史传统上是以作曲史的形式写成的，然而，音乐是作为表演进入大多数人的经验并变得有意义的。这项研究将试图勾勒出一段音乐现代主义的历史，体现在一首标志性的单曲《韦伯恩的钢琴变奏曲》作品27的录音表演中。韦伯恩于1935年至1936年创作了作品27，并以战前维也纳现代主义特有的超表现力风格设想其表演，但只有在以达姆施塔特为中心的战后先锋派背景下，表演传统才得以确立。音乐现在被视为完全不同的现代主义概念，其中情感表达的价值观让位于那些结构复杂和完整的价值观：表演者将作品27视为一种神圣的文本，在表演中以与宗教仪式大致相同的意义重现。然而，到了20世纪70年代，战后现代主义本身正在让位于一种新的、更具解释性的方法，这种方法同样可以被描述为更了解历史，或者倾向于后现代主义。我的研究将展示这种审美变化的宽泛叙事是如何被铭刻在作品27的录音中的，以及对录音的实证分析如何能够引起对现代主义对音乐的许多色调的细微差别的理解。基于对作品27的全部商业录音的收集，这项研究将建立在AHRC录音历史和分析研究中心(CHAME)开发的录音分析的计算方法基础上。它将寻求展示如何将量化方法应用于音乐学者主要关注的文化变化和意义问题。除了阐述作品27不断变化的表演传统及其与其他现代主义表现形式的关系外，这将涉及梳理经常被混为一谈的构图和表演方面。音乐理论家们传统上采取“逐页逐台”的方法，根据表演如何突出或表现出作曲结构来评价表演。但对于Op 27的表演者来说，这从来不是一个主要的担忧。虽然这部作品以对序列主义方法的异常严格的应用而闻名，但我将通过与勃拉姆斯的间奏曲作品116第5号(作品27与之有惊人的相似之处)的录音来展示，即使是达姆施塔特时代的直言主义表演者也利用了源自调性音乐表演的修辞和表达惯例。通过这种方式，我将争辩说，作曲结构和表演风格并不像音乐理论家认为的那样直接相关：表演者正是在他们之间的空间中行使他们的创作能力，而要从音乐学的角度来解释这一点，意味着要对音乐如何在表演中表现出更具包容性和更好的理论化理解。这项研究旨在为这一发展作出贡献。虽然音乐作为表演的研究的重要理论和方法论问题因此受到威胁，但我也打算公正地评价作品27所提供的丰富和多样化的个人解释方法。该项目所基于的69张作品27的录音集包括11张由个性独特且富有魅力的加拿大钢琴家格伦·古尔德创作的唱片，其中两张是为电视播放而制作的。我将通过这些录音记录他对作品27的解释，调查他的表演与他对韦伯恩和作品27的广泛口头评论的方式，以及他的演奏在多大程度上受到他与键盘接触的身体方面的影响。我希望结果将是对标志性表演者和标志性作品之间的接触进行多方面的研究，这些标志性作品公平地反映了文化背景、代理和创造力。

The history of music is traditionally written in the form of the history of compositions, yet it is as performance that music enters most people's experience and becomes meaningful. This research will attempt to sketch a history of musical modernism as embodied in recorded performances of a single, emblematic work, Webern's Piano Variations Op 27. Webern composed Op 27 in 1935-6, and envisaged its performance in terms of the hyper-expressive style characteristic of pre-war Viennese modernism, but a performance tradition became established only in the context of the post-war avant-garde centred on Darmstadt. The music was now seen in terms of a quite different conception of modernism, in which values of emotional expression gave way to those of structural complexity and integrity: performers treated Op 27 as a kind of sacred text, to be reproduced in performance in much the same sense as a religious ritual. By the 1970s, however, post-war modernism was itself giving way to a new, more interpretive approach that can equally be characterised as more historically informed or as tending towards postmodernism. My research will show how this broad narrative of aesthetic change is inscribed in recordings of Op 27, and how empirical analysis of recordings can give rise to nuanced understanding of the many shades which modernism has taken in music.Based on a complete collection of commercial recordings of Op 27, this research will build on computational methods for the analysis of recordings developed at the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). It will seek to show how quantitative methods can be brought to bear on the issues of cultural change and meaning with which musicologists are centrally concerned. In addition to setting out the changing performance tradition of Op 27 and its relationship to other expressions of modernism, this will involve teasing apart aspects of composition and of performance that are frequently conflated. Music theorists have traditionally adopted a 'page-to-stage' approach, evaluating performances in terms of how they underline or bring out compositional structure. But this has never been a primary concern for performers of Op 27. While the work is well known as an unusually rigorous application of the methods of serialism, I will show through comparison with recordings of Brahms's Intermezzo Op 116 No 5 (to which Op 27 bears a striking resemblance) that even the literalist performers of the Darmstadt era drew on rhetorical and expressive conventions derived from the performance of tonal music. In this way I shall argue that compositional structure and performance style are not as directly linked as music theorists have believed: it is in the space between them that performers exercise their creative agency, and doing musicological justice to this means developing a more inclusive and better theorised understanding of how music is represented in performance. This research is intended as a contribution towards such a development.While important theoretical and methodological issues of the study of music as performance are thus at stake, it is also my intention to do justice to the richness and variety of individual interpretive approaches that Op. 27 has afforded. The collection of 69 recordings of Op 27 on which the project is based includes eleven by the idiosyncratic and charismatic Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, of which two were made for televison. I will chart his interpretation of Op 27 across these recordings, investigating ways in which his performances relate to his extensive verbal commentaries on Webern and Op 27, and how far his playing was moulded by physical aspects of his engagement with the keyboard. I hope the result will be a multi-faceted study of the engagement between an emblematic performer and an emblematic work which does justice to cultural context, agency, and creativity.