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Minding the GAP: Margaret Bent and Lewis Lockwood in Conversation with Daniel Chua
Margaret Bent and Lewis Lockwood, the first recipients of the IMS Guido Adler Prize (IMS GAP), share their thoughts on how the field of musicology has changed over half a century and on the values that drive their research.
Daniel K. L. Chua (DC). Good evening everyone. It’s great to see all of you here at the opening of the Intercongressional IMS Symposium in Lucerne. It is also a great honor for me to welcome two eminent and legendary musicologists here this evening; they are the first recipients of the IMS Guido Adler Prize. Please join me in welcoming professors Margaret Bent and Lewis Lockwood. [Applause.]
I know that the only thing separating you from your dinner this evening is me. [Audience laughter.] So instead of moderating long keynote addresses from both our recipients, I’m going to have a relatively brief and informal conversation with them. So, you can relax.
The IMS was founded in 1927. At that time, Guido Adler was acknowledged as our honorary president. He was literally foundational when we were founded. When I think of Adler as one of the pioneers of our discipline, I realize how young musicology is. It is only somewhat more than a hundred years old, yet, looking back over the course of its development, so much has changed. What is astounding, as I sit here this evening, is that both our recipients have been involved in about half of this history. Meg and Lewis, over the last fifty or sixty years, you were both making musicology happen. So, my first question is: What was it like sixty years ago? It must have been so very, very different.
Margaret Bent (MB). Well, I think it was particularly difficult for me as a woman. I never expected to have a career. I came from a lower-class family. I grew up in a house with almost no books. My mother couldn’t see any need for me to continue with education. It was a teacher at school who made sure that I went on. But I did encounter more obstacles along the way. My mercurial and controversial mentor, Thurston Dart, put up a lot of objections to me doing research, then eventually let me through—but I really had to fight for that. If I had stayed in England, I would not have had the career I’ve had. The double move to the United States and back to England made it all possible. If I were to start now, it would be much easier. But at that time, I didn’t have any role models, and that was not easy. I just assumed that men got the jobs. My then husband was offered a job. I did my research because I enjoyed it, alongside part-time work and being a mother, and didn’t have any career expectations. I think partly because of that I have been very, very lucky in the way it worked out. And I haven’t suffered from jealousy because I had no expectations. [Laughter.]
DC. Still, it must have been very difficult. Many of us see you as a model, a pioneer, for women in musicology. Did you feel that you were representing that change?
MB. I suppose so, without really trying. I was the first woman to do various things; I was the only woman on various committees. I was very used to the idea that I’d say something and then it would be ignored. A man would make the same point a minute later and everyone would say, “Oh, what a good idea!” I was the thirteenth tenured woman at Princeton, the first female department chair there, and the first woman elected as a senior research fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. And I was very touched in the GAP citation that it was mentioned that I’ve done my best to help young scholars and especially young women.
DC. Where are we now on this issue?
MB. I’m pleased to see many younger women doing well in their careers, but there is still a way to go. The IMS so far has not yet had a female president.
DC. I know!
MB. The Royal Musical Association has never had a woman president. I was the second woman president of the AMS back in 1985. The AMS has been ahead on this.
DC. Yes, that’s definitely something we have to do something about. Lewis, I was wondering, how different things were for you when you started.
Lewis Lockwood (LL). Let me share some of my early musicological background. The first thing I say is I’m a New Yorker, born and bred. This means that I grew up in a time where classical music was everywhere. I sat in the top of Carnegie Hall and heard young people’s concerts by the New York Philharmonic. I was fortunate enough to go to the High School of Music and Art in the late 1940s which at that time was a high school with six orchestras, two choruses, and a full academic program. It transformed the lives of all of us who were fortunate enough to go there. Of course, it was a public high school. You had to have some credentials to get in, and I had. I was a young cellist at the time, and may I say, I still play. I keep my chamber music up no matter what happens.
Then I went to Queens College, a long subway ride from where I lived, but it didn’t matter. (By the way, the New York subway then worked, and it cost ten cents, which is no longer the case.) There I found a wonderful music department. Edward Lowinsky arrived on the scene while I was a student, and he was an enormous influence on me—not only as a music historian but also as a musician. He was a very dynamic scholar with extremely original and even highly controversial ideas. His important book had just been published two years before when I arrived at Queens College in the early 1950s, entitled
Secret Chromatic Art in the Netherlands Motet. It is a book about cultural secrecy, about hidden chromatic passages within the motets. A lot of people didn’t want to believe it, but Lowinsky was a passionate advocate of his ideas. He sent me on to graduate school in Princeton, and there I encountered a much larger panoply of ideas, worlds, and subjects. Principal professors at that time for me were Oliver Strunk, Arthur Mendel, Nino Pirrotta (who came as a guest); and the first Beethoven seminar I took was with Elliot Forbes, while he was revising Thayer’s Life of Beethoven. It was an extraordinary time!
DC. Who had the most influence on you at that time?
LL. Of these, Strunk was the most deeply influential, for his breadth of knowledge, his quiet demeanor, and his generosity of spirit. A couple of words about Strunk: Oliver Strunk was the son of the English professor, William Strunk, who had written at Cornell, years and years ago, a little book called The Elements of Style, about how to write good English. “Omit needless words,” said Professor Strunk, the father, and that’s what his son Oliver did all his life. Oliver Strunk omitted words more eloquently than anybody I have ever known. He would stand against the blackboard with a Camel cigarette in one hand—you could smoke then—and in very few words he would outline some enormous topic, like “How Dufay’s music gradually transformed itself from the conditions that prevailed in the fourteenth century, for example, isorhythm, down to the wonderful, lyrical, and complex works of his last years.” Strunk was self-taught; he had, however, a laser-like ability to focus on the main issues. For him, you learned any subject or field by finding out what we know and what the sources of our knowledge are. Then how to go directly to them to see what new insights could be found. It didn’t matter if it were medieval chant, early polyphony, Josquin, or the origins of opera. In a funny way, his model stays with you, you internalize it into your world, and I can’t avoid having that model in mind.
DC. Your research subject has certainly moved in different directions, but I guess the underlying model is the same Strunk-like approach.
LL. Yes, I first started out doing Renaissance because the Lowinskyan wave was still washing over me. In my dissertation on late sixteenth-century sacred music, I focused on a cultural-political problem—namely, what did the promise of the Counter-Reformation want sacred music to be? The answer is: They wanted it so that the texts would be intelligible. Now, to make the text intelligible in complex polyphony is a job, and very few people were satisfactorily doing it. Palestrina does it in his inimitable way. But I found an interesting composer, Vincenzo Ruffo, who did do it, and became the musical agent of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo. (By the way, it is Carlo Borromeo about whom Lord Acton said, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And I throw that out because these days absolute power is showing signs of corrupting on many fronts.)
Later, for various reasons, I wanted to do more in the Renaissance, and I went up to see Nino Pirrotta in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and got good ideas from him about where some fruitful tasks might lie. I found my way to writing, for the first time as it turns out, the documented history of the world of the Este Dukes of Ferrara up to the year 1505, which is up to the end of when Duke Hercules I ruled—this is Hercules Dux Ferrariae, for those of you who know the Josquin masses.
And then it came upon me that Beethoven was really where I wanted to be, because it would take me back to having played the cello since I was twelve years old. One day, my phone rang and William Mitchell of Columbia University asked me if I would like to write up the autograph manuscript of the great A-major Cello Sonata, op. 69, the foundation work of later cello sonata literature. I couldn’t believe how lucky that sounded. So, I went up to New York to work on it. It was in the possession of Felix Salzer, a well-known Schenker theorist and a student of Schenker. And for me the rest was history. [Audience laughter.]
DC. Literally history!
LL. I think the answer to that is that I moved into the field where I felt fully at home and still do, and there’s no substitute for that.
DC. Today, when we consider your early work, some people tend to think that it’s all a bit old fashioned. But we forget that it was innovative research. Meg, what was path-breaking about the Old Hall Manuscript you worked on? Or Lewis, the work you did on the duchy of Ferrara, how was that path-breaking?
MB. I think we need to take a step back here. When I started my research work, you did research on what we didn’t know. We didn’t do research on Beethoven, because we “knew” Beethoven. So, that accounts for the stream of dissertations, particularly from NYU and Indiana, on the “life-and-works” of little-known Renaissance composers. And, in my generation most people went into early music because it was relatively unknown. This may well be why Lewis started out in Renaissance music and only later felt able to work professionally on Beethoven. I became deeply fascinated by things I didn’t know before, especially the notation and codicological aspects of the Old Hall Manuscript and from there out into all aspects of context, both its institutional-historical context and also how to bridge the gap between under-prescriptive notation and what we do with it in performance. On this question of how the subjects change, I think it’s important to bear in mind that only two of my contemporaries carried out research into nineteenth-century music at that time: one was Hugh Macdonald on Berlioz and the other was Philip Gossett on Rossini. Both these composers were not part of the German canon, and undervalued at that time.
DC. There were certainly so many gaps.
MB. There were huge gaps. I think I can say that in Lewis’s case, his work on the Beethoven op. 69 Cello Sonata and his work on Ferrara were both absolutely seminal when I succeeded him at Princeton when he went to Harvard in the early 1980s. I remember in one seminar I led on “Music and Cities,” that Lewis’s then-recent book on Ferrara, Reinhard Strohm’s on Bruges, and Allan Atlas’s on Naples were particularly important. And, of course, the Beethoven connection brings up performance. Lewis has worked with the Juilliard String Quartet on that and I’ve worked extensively with early music groups on how to consider ways of bridging this gap that I talked about, between the original notation or even the modern edition, and what has to be done to understand it and bring it to sound in performance.
DC. And using manuscripts.
MB. Yes! I’ve been doing this for decades—singing from facsimiles with undergraduates, graduates, and colleagues. It is a great way these days, when early music is often deprecated and undervalued in music departments, of beckoning bright young students into the field. And most of my work takes manuscripts as its starting point.
DC. Lewis, Meg has very kindly spoken about your major contribution to the field. I wonder if you could do the same for her: What do you think is Meg Bent’s major contribution to musicology?
LL. At the risk of perhaps seeming to slightly embellish, I’d simply say: Meg is one of the great mediaevalists in musicology. That’s the first thing. How she has been is the product of intense and unerring attention to details but at the same time a vision of the problems that the details make up, what they build, what they form. Music is after all a language, it is an art, it is a deep human need, it is a fundamental condition of what I hope we can accept as the way humans should live. But every portion of it has its own physiognomy, and by portion I also mean, that if you are a historian, you yearn to know not simply how things were generally but what really happened.
Now, when I use the words “what really happened” here in Switzerland, I am close enough to the border of a country to the north to refer to “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.” Ranke’s famous dictum about what is history, which is very much in some quarters denied, put down, or ridiculed. Post-modern musicology threw a large monkey wrench into the viewpoint that we can really know. You have to think about who I am that knows it and the identity of the agency. It is fundamental. The agency of mediaeval studies is the product of intellectuals and musicians who yearn to know how things really were. And the only way to find out is if you look at the artifacts which we have from that time. No medievalist and, I would say, no music historian in any field that I know, or know of, has exemplified the true scholarly approach more fully or with greater breadth than Meg Bent. There is a tradition of work on English medieval music that has had important practitioners, and certainly the same is true of the study of French and Italian music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But Meg is perhaps the only one I know of who is equally at home with John Dunstable, Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and a host of Italian musicians of the Quattrocento. Her editions of the Old Hall Manuscript and of the great manuscript Bologna Q15 stand side by side as truly path-breaking achievements. And she has led the field in her work on notation, counterpoint, analysis, and a host of related subjects.
Regarding artifacts, allow me to use another metaphor—it’s not really a metaphor, it’s more a personal deep feeling about what research is. One thing about research for me is that you do it with your hands. Let’s say, what was happening in Vienna between 1820 and 1827, in other words, Beethoven’s last years. Of course, I have books and stuff at home. But to go to a great library, to stand in front of the Austrian section in Widener library and pull down books in five minutes, leaf through, see what’s what, get started, move the needle closer to what seems to be, find out what people think they know about what the case is. The hands, my hands, are doing it. There is a certain sense in which I can’t do this as easily digitally; I tried, and I do do it. But: It can’t dogear for one thing, you can’t pull up and down so easily, and you can’t use your hands as well as your head to bring it forth.
DC. What’s interesting about hands in your work, particularly on the Eroica sketchbook, is that actually seeing and holding “the thing” has been really important in understanding how Beethoven composed. If you had just seen the Eroica sketchbook digitally on the screen, you would have missed the bigger picture of Beethoven’s compositional process.
LL. There is something very wonderful about the Eroica sketchbook that was discovered in the course of our joint project by my co-editor and colleague, Alan Gosman, who worked with me on the Eroica sketchbook in the critical edition that we published in 2013. The sketchbook is in Kraków. We went there to see and hold the manuscript in our hands. Alan did his work and I did mine. One day I was sitting at home in Massachusetts and Alan was in Michigan and he called me up and said, “Are you sitting down?” and I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Look at the following pages where there are folds in the manuscript.” So, I looked at the pages; he was telling me they were folded. Here is an example: On page 6, let’s say, is Beethoven’s first idea for the slow movement, the funeral march—not yet at all fully written out. On the next leaf over are the first ideas for the scherzo—even more primitive. And facing those two pages, if you fold them down, you see on the next page the first continuity draft for the first movement. And what it shows here and in later similar constellations of folded pages is that Alan’s discovered that, while writing the first movement, Beethoven had folded the pages so he could see what he was going to do about the slow movement and the scherzo, and that in fact the totality was in some incipient sense before his mind. By the way, when writing Leonore twelve years later, Beethoven said: “It is my custom even in instrumental music to keep the whole in view.” So that’s what I’m talking about when I refer to “the hands.”
DC. Meg, do you want to add anything about artifacts, because I can see that there is renewed interest in objects and artifacts, in material histories, actor networks, object-oriented ontologies, and so on: Do you think source studies and archival studies may come back in a new way?
MB. You’re raising a general question of the huge transformation which has happened in our world. Well, there are several: one is technological and one is social. The social revolution is obvious, both in a greater ethnic and gender inclusiveness of the musicological community, and, partly as a result of that, in the great expansion of fields studied and questions asked. On the technical side, I typed my dissertation with six carbon copies—xeroxing had just come in but was much too expensive. Even in the 1980s we still made handouts for our Princeton classes with purple jelly stencil machines. For those of you who are younger here, imagine a world with no internet, no computers, no mobile phones, and no digital images. That world has been entirely transformed. And now, of course, the pendulum has swung to assuming that you can get everything online. In fact, you can’t. There are a lot of things: Google Books, for example, is a big disappointment if you thought you could get everything at your fingertips. Many, many archives are not online, and those that are can be very hard to consult. There are so many things which you can only see from a manuscript. You may be surprised that the manuscript is larger or smaller than an A4 paper because we are used to seeing everything on the screen and letter-sized. Richard Crocker said in a 1961 article that what we have to do to understand the music of people in the past is take their books in our hands and read. And we still do physically need to take the book, as Lewis has said. It’s a needed skill in teaching to persuade the younger students of today to go to the library and read books. If it’s not online, they don’t want to read it. But there are so many things that we can learn from books.
So, where is this going? I think that the availability of digital images and access to so much material online will certainly transform some of my work. Because when I was working on the scribes of the Old Hall Manuscript, in my rare access to the manuscript, you had to look here and there, and, when nobody was looking, you might have tried to make tracings. Otherwise it was comparing images on miserable black and white microfilms. New technology is marvelous. But you still have to have the originals because of the things that you see or don’t see online.
And as for the current status: Historical musicology is being squeezed—without more faculty appointments, it’s being squeezed to make room for other things. Now, the other things it’s making room for are valuable and good. But some of us whose work has largely been in historical musicology regret the need for that squeezing. And medieval and Renaissance music is particularly squeezed because it doesn’t meet the criteria of “relevance” and economic yield.
DC. In a way, it shouldn’t be a zero-sum game.
MB. That’s right.
DC. If we are going for greater diversity and plurality, we need to increase numbers and not just redistribute the same numbers. With your kind of work being squeezed and sidelined, have you ever felt that you went out of fashion?
MB. I don’t care about fashion. [Audience laughter.] I haven’t gone out for celebrity status of that kind; one sees critical fashions of great popularity, and they go by. This is rather the same as what Lewis was saying: You work for the material. You let the material dictate what you do with it. And I have never been in favor of applying any kind of outside theory. It may be unfashionable to say that, but that’s what I do; it’s a kind of forensic approach, I suppose.
DC. A question for both of you: In your long careers, what are the paths scholars have taken that have been positive changes for the discipline? And, with hindsight, what paths would you rather people hadn’t gone down, either because they were a dead end or maybe just a wrong turn?
MB. I’m very reluctant to criticize or condemn any paths. People sincerely do what they do. I was president of the AMS at the time when we were raising money for what would then be called the AMS50 Awards. It was something I was deeply committed to—raising money for graduate fellowships. The subtext was to keep the AMS together and to give it some unity because there was so much splintering of music theory, ethnomusicology, and other subdisciplines. We saw the AMS as an umbrella for everything, stressing the unity of the society, and that it was open to all branches of musical scholarship. That was very important.
DC. Right. We have the same all-encompassing vision for the IMS—how to keep all these things together. Lewis, what about you? Any paths better not taken?
LL. I don’t want to go back to the particulars and minutiae of scholarly approaches in Western music that Meg, I, and many people have been doing. Let me just reflect a little bit on some of the older questions of context and values. Daniel, when you asked whether the kind of stuff that Meg and I do may be considered out of fashion, I agree with Meg a hundred percent: Fashion is not a problem I want to worry about. But I can understand that for a lot of people it is a problem to worry about. Because you can’t do this kind of work unless you’ve got support, and you can’t get support unless you’ve got a position. In these days, I don’t have to tell anybody that enormous issues of change in society, politics, and many other dimensions of Western life—including the issues of race, class, and gender—are real. Of course, they are real. It’s unquestionable. And I understand perfectly that for many people the idea of spending a lot of time deciding whether a certain note is E-flat or E-natural doesn’t seem like something that’s going to make a change in society. I understand—it doesn’t. And it isn’t going to, by the way. But the attitude which generated the question, the attitude that asks, “what do I really know about something and do I care deeply enough about it to focus with laser concentration upon this little issue for now, then seeing it in a larger context of wherever those notes are—and those notes belong to somebody,” that attitude is important.
Of course, the other thing that is transforming Western culture right now is the globalization of culture everywhere. One of my greatest friends is a Chinese Beethoven scholar. He wrote to me and said he wanted to come to consult me. He came to Boston and rented a house for a year. We spent a wonderful time together, and we were talking about how in China Beethoven was an immensely important factor. I think that nothing is worth thinking about more in the context of the IMS than what music counts where. Of course, Chinese traditional music, which must be a magnificent subject of vast importance, is deeply cultivated and co-exists with the world in which classical Western music is deeply rooted. How can this be? It is a great question. You understand this much better than I do, Daniel, for obvious reasons.
DC. In many ways, Asia right now is much more invested in what we might call “Western classical music” than the west. In fact, the piano is much more popular in China than anywhere else in the world.
LL. Isn’t that a fantastically important issue for our society to be talking about.
DC. If you stand back and look at the world globally, issues become completely different; what you think might be dying is alive and growing elsewhere. Getting the bigger picture is key and the IMS enables these divergences across the globe to interact in order to gain a better perspective on musicology. But I don’t want to talk too much—this session is not about my views. One last question: Where in an ideal world would you like to see musicology go from here?
MB. I don’t think it’s up to me or anybody else to say where it should go.
DC. Well, in an ideal world, what would you like to see?
MB. I care very much about the field that I spent most of my life working on. Lewis and I have just come from Basel where the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference had 350 delegates and almost as many papers. I was one of the people who started those annual conferences in 1973 with about thirty or forty people. It’s just wonderful to see this expansion in that field; very high-quality papers, but a lot of these people don’t have jobs. But the disjunction between that level of activity—high-quality activity in that field—and the shrinking of jobs, especially in Britain and North America, is something that gives me pause. And I wonder where this is going to go. And I think that things that have been sidelined will come back. Tom Stoppard in his wonderful play Arcadia said of the loss of the Library of Alexandria that all that knowledge would be reinvented in a different way. And I think that’s what we can expect from future musicology. Archival research was pushed aside, treated as mechanical and boring, but people will find new ways of doing it, new questions to pose.
DC. The field will be different?
MB. I think the fields that have gone into semi-retirement will come back in different ways. And in this case, I feel stimulated by the possibilities that the internet gives for certain kinds of research. When I started my research, you could spend a whole morning chasing up a reference that you can now find at the click of mouse. That’s an improvement! It is this kind of improvement that will lead to a rediscovery of things that we thought were sidelined. And the availability now of digital images has revitalized the study of manuscripts.
DC. Lewis, do you have any thoughts on where you like things to be going?
LL. A part of me believes that—as Meg said—pontificating in some sense about where the field should go is too big or too broad and a bit flimsy, because what it comes down to is what each person in the field thinks he or she should do. And the reason he or she should do it is what counts. I have a fondness for the late American physicist Richard Feynman, who was a great character. One of his books of essays is entitled Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and that goes back to his being offered tea at Princeton Graduate School by the Dean’s wife, who said, “Do you take milk or lemon in your tea?” And he said, “Both,” whereupon she said, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” So, why Feynman? Because he was a true original. He reports, while a graduate student, being on the telephone with a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, suggesting that in some way in quantum theory things can not only go in that direction but they can go in this direction, and in some preposterous way they can do both. Don’t ask me to say more than that on quantum physics. And in a book about Feynman by James Gleick, a very good expositor of scientific subjects, Feynman’s credo comes out. I can’t produce all of it, but I produce this: Says Feynman, “Science is a way to teach how things get to be known. For nothing is known absolutely.” The notion that it is a way to teach how things get to be known means that there is a tradition that teachers pass on to students, and then these students to their own students. Each student becomes a teacher of somebody, just the way we raise our children and they raise their children, and so forth. In a funny sense we are a family and families have their problems. And one problem is that the kids don’t want to do what the grownups did, and the grownups don’t understand it. So, now what? Well, I think I’ll just leave it at that! It’s a question which is formed at the personal level rather than at the general level.
MB. Let me just say that it is deeply touching that you have chosen to honor two scholars of whom we have been asked whether they’ve ever felt they were out of fashion! [Laughter.]
DC. Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have both of you here in conversation with me. You have given us so much insight and are still passing on knowledge from one generation to another.
To end, I hope we can take away the idea that our research should be like quantum theory where we can have two or more different or seemingly incompatible things happening at the same time, moving in contrary directions on varying scales. In musicology, it’s possible to do these extraordinary things and still be family, ancient and modern, faddish and not. That’s what the IMS community is about. Lewis and Meg, you’ve been wonderful. Thank you so much! [Huge applause.]
