A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches

This indispensable handbook explains how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts. Over the past quarter century, the scholarly study of autograph sources has exploded and nowhere is this more true than in the field of twentieth-century music. And yet, few if any courses or seminars broach the subject of sketch studies and the skills required to examine the manuscripts. This book surveys the knowledge necessary to work efficiently in archives and libraries housing this material and with the skills and techniques specifically related to sketch studies: transcription, reconstructing sketchbooks, deciphering handwriting, dating documents. It deals with the music of important twentieth-century composers and presents visual examples of manuscripts from the collections of world renowned institutions such as the Paul Sacher Foundation. The book aims to make the work of both researchers and students more efficient and rewarding.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Friedemann Sallis and Patricia Hall; 1. Sketches and sketching Giselher Schubert and Friedemann Sallis; 2. Preliminaries before visiting an archive Ulrich Mosch; 3. Archival etiquette Therese Muxeneder; 4. Coming to terms with the composer's working manuscripts Friedemann Sallis; 5. The classification of musical sketches exemplified in the catalogue of the Archivio Luigi Nono Erika Schaller; 6. Digital preservation of archival material William Koseluk; 7. Transcribing sketches Regina Busch; 8. A tale of two sketchbooks: reconstructing and deciphering Alban Berg's sketchbooks for Wozzeck Patricia Hall; 9. 'Written between the desk and the piano': dating Béla Bartók's sketches László Somfai; 10. Defining compositional process: idea and instrumentation in Igor Stravinsky's Ragtime (1918) and Pribaoutki (1915) Tomi Mäkelä; 11. Floating hierarchies: organisation and composition in works by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen during the 1950s Pascal Decroupet; 12. Elliot Carter's sketches: spiritual exercises and craftsmanship Denis Vermaelen; 13. E-Sketches: Brian Ferneyhough's use of computer assisted compositional tools Ross Feller; 14. John Cage's Williams Mix (1951–3): the restoration and new realizations of and variations on the first octophonic, surround-sound tape composition Larry Austin; Appendix. Select list of institutions housing manuscript collections of twentieth-century composers.

About the Author :
Patricia Hall is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Department of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of A View of Berg's 'Lulu' through the Autograph Sources (1997). She has also contributed to several works including The Cambridge Companion to Alban Berg (1996) and has written articles and reviews for a number of journals. Friedemann Sallis is Professor titulaire at the Departement de musique, Universite de Moncton. He is the author of An Introduction to the Early Works of Gyorgy Ligeti (1996). He also contributed to Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde (L. Sitsky ed., 2002) and has published numerous articles on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Review :
'… a wide-ranging, handsomely presented, pedagogical survey that is intended to explain "how scholars and students should work with and think about the composer's working manuscripts" … invaluable resource … The contributing authors strike a fair balance between practical guidance and specific research concerns, and there is a useful appendix that lists the addresses of thirty-eight archives and institutes that house twentieth-century music manuscripts … offers sound advice … invaluable … The author's extensive knowledge of Bartok's sketches is amply illustrated in this chapter … this information is fascinating.' Twentieth-Century Music