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Volume 6 (2012-13) ISSN 1751-7788 Correlation, Collaboration, and Contradiction: The Programme Notes from Recordings of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, and the Middlebrow Analytical Tradition Bethany Lowe University of Plymouth I. Notes on notes Many recordings of music, released in the form of a CD, cassette, or record, 1 carry a programme note, also known as a sleeve note or liner note. Such notes are intended to introduce listeners to the genre or work – and in some cases, the performance – guide them through it, and impose on them a culturally ‘correct’ way of perceiving the music. The relationship between the writings on the cover and the sonic contents, however, are still open to question. Is there any correlation between the interpretative choices made by the performer and those conjured up by the writer? Do successive sleeve notes for the same work have a diachronic connection with each other, or any interaction with other types of written materials? And what ideological work are the writers of sleeve notes trying to accomplish? These are some of the questions I’m hoping to address in this article. Programme notes for live concert performances have been defined by 2 Christina Bashford as ‘printed words addressed to audiences', sometimes 'accompanied by thematic material printed in music type'1 and by Nigel Simeone as ‘a written commentary … intended to inform the listener about the music to be performed’.2 The historical role of programme notes, for Bashford, was ‘in developing music appreciation and in shaping listening practices’, and thus she claims that they made ‘a significant contribution to the delineation of high musical culture’ in the 19th century.3 Writers on programme notes generally remark on their distinctively British origins, a situation which Catherine Dale attributes to a nineteenth-century combination of inadequate analytical education and Victorian didacticism.4 It is also common to note their open-ended relationships with other forms of creativity such as composition, performance, analytical writing and hermeneutics, art and design, advertising, reviewing, broadcasting, and dictionary-writing and other educational work. As Bashford describes it, there is a network of relationships articulated through these notes,5 such that ‘The history of the programme note is inevitably entwined with other aspects of British cultural life’.6 The notes attached to recordings have attracted less definition, though 3 Simeone observes that they tended initially to be ‘similar in style to the concert programme notes of the time’.7 Terms for these materials include sleeve note, liner note, disc note, or album note – though the generic term ‘programme note’ is not inappropriate. Colin Symes, who has given them a more thorough consideration in his book Setting the Record Straight, notes that they occupy a modal universe different from that of the record[ing], and much of their efficacy as a textual form depends on their capacity to accord with its contents and minimize any distortion that might flow from transferring between modes of ‘meaning’.8 Symes argues that ‘sleeve notes, like cover designs, act as mediating texts that provide a particular reading of the music that interposes itself between the loudspeaker and the listener’.9 They can thus be construed as part of the work’s paratext, elements which ‘lie on the threshold of the text and which help to direct and control the reception of a text by its readers’.10 In his book Paratexts, Gerald Genette describes the function of these liminal elements in terms of both a transition and a transaction.11 In the case of a book, paratextual material typically includes titles, prefaces, and notes, elements that deploy predominantly the same mode of discourse as its text, namely written prose, and are hence peritexts; but due to the ambiguous notion of ‘a recording’ as signifying either the bare sound trace or the whole commercial package, sleeve notes can be thought to exist either within or without its threshold, and hence are arguably a mere accompanying epitext to the sounding performance.12 Whether the sleeve note is integral or accompanimental to the recording is an ambiguity inherent to the genre, and the recordings investigated in this article will be found to take up varying positions along this continuum. Sleeve notes serve to introduce a wide range of potentially unfamiliar works 4 and styles to listeners whose identity is unknown by the writers. As such their function is both educational or enlightening, in serving to give a leg-up to those without more specialist knowledge, and commercial, in that it aims to draw in a greater number of listeners than the bare sound trace might be able.13 They have been pivotal to the commercial and intellectual success of various types of music since the onset of recording, including ‘early music’, whose scholarly packaging formed a key part of its connoisseur image in the latter part of the twentieth century,14 and ‘world music’, whose acquaintance with European audiences in recent decades has been facilitated primarily through accompanying sleeve notes.15 As Beverley Parker points out in her case study of South African music, the notes accompanying both concerts and recordings have the power to affect our perception of music’s aesthetic value as either art or artifact, and function as part of the cultural system’s ‘machine for making authenticity’.16 In particular, Parker points out that the process of providing a structural analytical commentary with the music recording can work to catapult a musical artifact into the realm of art, with a consequently higher status available to attach itself to the listening public.17 In the case of large formally-complex classical works, sleeve notes that contain 5 analytical description might be thought to manipulate the listener’s perception in ways that are particularly intimate to the fabric of the soundscape. Analytical writings typically parse a piece, providing points of articulation and grouping structures to enable a listener to navigate more confidently what may be an intricate and lengthy slice of music. However, as Nicholas Cook has pointed out, formal analytical publications, in the form of books and articles, form part of the reception network ‘only for the small minority of musically educated listeners. Others must avail themselves of the potted biographies and analyses on the backs of record sleeves’.18 Sleeve notes thus work at the sharp end of music-analytical discourse reception, since their immediacy and wide circulation enhances the influential power of these writings upon listeners. In contrast with interpretations presented in free-standing books and articles, 6 each attempt to lead the listener towards a given understanding of the work, provided as a sleeve note, is packaged physically together with a particular recorded performance. Sleeve notes function successfully because people tend to ‘assimilate what they see and what they hear into a composite experience’, a process which is possible because of music’s ‘openness to semantic completion’.19 When the note and the performance seem to be working together to create an interpretation, an interesting synergy takes place which Cook has referred to as a ‘domestic Gesamtkunstwerk’.20 This synergy is a manifestation of the holistic way in which an individual builds up a mental representation of any piece of music through exposure to a variety of experiences.21 This composite perceptual experience, though, is challenged on occasions 7 when the written interpretation affixed to the record cover bears no relation to, or explicitly appears to contradict, the approach taken by the musical performers. This situation can be caused by genuine differences of interpretation between the note author and the performer, which pull against each other to persuade the listener of their validity. However it is in other cases the result of variations in the practical process of note-writing: a causal one-to- one relationship between a recording and its accompanying text, which may be thought normal or ideal for investigating the connection between them, does not always prevail. Sometimes note authors are given a version of the recording to respond to, so that their text forms a gloss to the performance (congruent or otherwise), while others produce their copy without hearing the performance that it will sit alongside.22 Only in certain (artistically privileged) cases do note authors get the chance to collaborate with the performers to produce an integrated musical statement. A one-to-many relationship often arises where a recording is reissued – perhaps much later in time, perhaps in a different format – and receives a new sleeve note; a many-to-one relationship is evident where a programme note is recycled and a writer submits only a marginally-altered text for what may be a very different performance; and plenty of recordings have no narrative material at all. A certain casualness of authorship is to some extent in the nature of the programme note convention: recycling, plagiarism, and anonymity were common in the culture of early concert programme notes,23 and likewise the exact process of formulation of a particular sleeve note cannot always be traced. Despite these inconsistencies of creative intention in the pairing of sleeve 8 notes with performances, their association into a single physical object binds them into a symbiotic relationship (whether harmonious or incongruous) in the listener’s reception. Thus it is worth starting to ask questions of sleeve notes, their function, and their writers, and draw some likely conclusions from the available information about their relationship to the sound recording, their audience, and its cultural context. To further complicate matters, a sleeve note may make reference to critical, 9 analytical, or informative texts that are outside the apparently closed circle of the performance and its commentary - depending on the author’s style, the available word-count, and the imagined audience.

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