Shadows of meaning: Webern's Piano Variations on record

传统上，音乐史是以谱曲史的形式写成的，然而，音乐是以表演的形式进入大多数人的体验并变得有意义的。本研究将试图勾勒出音乐现代主义的历史，体现在一个单一的，象征性的作品，韦伯恩的钢琴变奏曲Op 27的录音表演。韦伯在1935年至1936年创作了Op 27，并设想其表现为战前维也纳现代主义的超表现力风格特征，但一种表现传统仅在战后以达姆施塔特为中心的先锋派背景下建立起来。现在，人们用一种完全不同的现代主义观念来看待这首音乐，在这种观念中，情感表达的价值让位于结构的复杂性和完整性：表演者将Op 27视为一种神圣的文本，在表演中以与宗教仪式相同的意义进行复制。然而，到了20世纪70年代，战后现代主义本身正在让位给一种新的、更具解释性的方法，这种方法同样可以被描述为更多的历史信息或倾向于后现代主义。我的研究将展示这种美学变化的广泛叙述如何被铭刻在Op 27的录音中，以及对录音的实证分析如何能够对现代主义在音乐中所采取的许多阴影产生细致入微的理解。基于Op 27的完整商业录音集，这项研究将建立在AHRC历史和音乐记录分析研究中心（CHARM）开发的录音分析计算方法的基础上。它将试图展示定量方法如何能够被带到音乐学家关注的文化变革和意义问题上。除了阐述Op 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，还包括梳理经常混淆的作曲和表演方面。音乐理论家传统上采用一种“从页面到舞台”的方法，根据他们如何强调或揭示作曲结构来评估表演。但这从来都不是Op 27的表演者们最关心的问题。虽然这部作品被认为是对序列主义方法的异常严格的应用，但我将通过与勃拉姆斯的间奏曲Op 116 No 5 （Op 27与Op 116 No 5有着惊人的相似之处）的录音比较来展示，即使是达姆施塔特时代的文字表演者也从调性音乐的表演中借鉴了修辞和表达的惯例。通过这种方式，我将论证作曲结构和表演风格并不像音乐理论家所认为的那样直接相关：表演者在它们之间的空间中行使他们的创造性代理，而对这一点进行音乐学上的公正意味着对音乐在表演中的表现方式进行更具包容性和更好的理论化理解。本研究旨在为这一发展作出贡献。虽然音乐作为表演研究的重要理论和方法问题因此受到威胁，但我也打算公正地对待Op. 27所提供的丰富多样的个人解释方法。《第27号作品》的69张唱片是这个项目的基础，其中11张是由性格独特、魅力非凡的加拿大钢琴家格伦·古尔德（Glenn Gould）录制的，其中两张是为电视制作的。我将通过这些录音记录他对Op 27的解读，研究他的表演与他对Webern和Op 27的广泛口头评论之间的关系，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。我希望结果将是对象征性表演者和象征性作品之间的互动进行多方面的研究，以公正地对待文化背景，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.