John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page.

Preiss, Robin

John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page.

(Eastman Studies in Music, 98). Rochester,

N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

[xii, 205 p. ISBN: 978-1-58-046404-8. 50 [pounds sterling]]

If early twentieth-century Modernism was the penultimate major musical movement in which composers were obligated to rely on notation to convey their musical ideas (p. 155), then Drew Massey's account of the intersection between composition and the world of editing is a worthwhile study. Throughout history, the printed page has been essential to the production, distribution, performance, and scholarly dissemination of Western music. As technologies have expanded, the philosophical tenets of publication remain the same in questioning the autonomy of works and quantifying creative license and intellectual property therein. Does a work have a true, purely unadulterated state? Where and when does a sketch end and a work begin? What constitutes aesthetic merit? These highly subjective questions of art are peppered throughout seven chapters that contain the body of the text. To answer them from John Kirkpatrick's perspective, (1) Massey calls upon various sources of evidence, including published scores, composer manuscripts, annotated page proofs, and comprehensive records of correspondence.

Massey's objectives are to illustrate these diversities and complexities of Kirkpatrick's editing process and to show how editing became his primary mode of musical engagement and critique. As evidenced by his critical editions (2) of the Concord Sonata and other contemporary works, Kirkpatrick's editorial strategy varied significantly from one project to the next. The formula was dependent on factors such as the collaborative or posthumous timing of the edition, the personality of the composer, and the tone of their collaborative relationship. The malleability of Kirkpatrick's technique combined with the rigor and seriousness that he brought to the task arguably resist the summation of a 'grand theory of editing'. If the book offers an overarching thesis, it is that Kirkpatrick's editorial approach was historiographical in nature. It resists the temptation to generalize the editor's motives and methods, rather seeking to 'contextualize them as constructed historical observations'. The author's own voice is deliberately and often painfully neutral in avoiding a subjective opinion on the quality of Kirkpatrick's work.

The discussions are built upon a number of loosely defined terms from the music publishing world. As readers, we may ask ourselves what constitutes an editor. Perhaps a caricatured figure comes to mind: stern and bespectacled, sitting behind a heavy wooden desk with a red pen in hand. In reality, the varied tasks associated with music editing are performed by an equally varied cast of characters, such as friends, fellow artists, interpreters, performers, critics, representatives of publishing houses, and of course professional editors. The practice of editing in the most traditional sense consists of the changes made to a manuscript before the work goes to press and the ink is figuratively rolled onto the plates. An edition is not necessarily simply a published version of a composer's notation produced for use in performance. It may also be a revised, arranged, parodied variant, a realization of an indeterminate composition or a research tool created specifically for scholarly purposes, or a speculative or early preference edition. The scopes of these categories are not universally defined nor are they mutually exclusive. As we know it today, the publishing industry encompasses media beyond the printed page to include audio, moving image and digital formats. Likewise, the impetus for editing works represents a broader enterprise. (3)

Massey is very careful to expunge his own opinions from the account, carefully framing his goal for the book as an "account of Kirkpatrick's participation in the art world ... and how he wielded and invented tools for editorial practice in response to the music in front of him". This thesis statement seems intentionally vague and the extreme caution toward asserting value judgments is somewhat frustrating. The book brings to light so many interesting findings from the archival work that has been done, and his prose often reads as the travel log of an explorer whom we imagine sleuthing and uncovering primary evidence. But elaboration on these findings is sometimes limited by the author's unwillingness to make any broader comment on them.

The chapter 'Beginnings' opens with a selection of choice snapshots of different locales and periods in Kirkpatrick's life. The curation of these vignettes jumps around chronologically, avoiding a potentially biographical narrative. Much of the description of Kirkpatrick's early life is anecdotal, told through the recollections of colleagues and friends Giles Gilbert and H. Wiley Hitchcock. One photograph from the Lawrenceville School depicts the eighteen-year-old as already "a man whose business is scrutiny, not to be scrutinized," cleverly foreshadowing his later careers as an editor and professor. The chronology of the narrative casually leaps the span of many decades forward and backward in time, pivoting dishevelled youth against the persona of authority and maturity reached later in life.

'Mentorship: Music Publishing' profiles Kirkpatrick's relationships with a handful of composers, namely Robert Palmer, Hunter Johnson and Arthur Farwell. The nature of their relationships with Kirkpatrick, whose role oscillated between that of friend and mentor, collaborator and critic, are explored through the lens of specific pieces on which they collaborated. Kirkpatrick helped composers shape their public careers, and in doing so encouraged maturity, seriousness, and an identifiably "American" sound. In these relationships, composition was treated as avenue for academic and publishing success. The unique challenges of collaborative style are further explored in a discussion of Carl Ruggles's Evocations. Massey's intense analyses of various manifestations of the Evocations score are quite effective and his presentation of corresponding passages from different versions of the work make the important differences easily identifiable. Here, Massey stresses his goal to broaden the reader's perspective of collaborative and compositional style, not to impose a value judgment onto the reader.

The fourth chapter is dedicated to Ives' Concord Sonata and Kirkpatrick's role in establishing fixed impressions for performance and recording purposes. Their sixty-year collaboration was fraught with tension between Kirkpatrick's desire for fixity as the performer and Ives's preference for fluidity and improvisation as the composer. (4) Chapter 5 returns to Carl Ruggles and his composition called Mood. Perhaps more than any other, this chapter grapples with the metaphysical question of what constitutes a work. How do we view autonomy of Mood in relation to Ruggles's opera The Sunken Bell, when the manuscript proves their joint conception and the eventual split in their manifestation?

This case study demonstrates how difficult it is for an editor to stick to the evidence at hand, and to refrain from speculation, elaboration, and the incorporation of personal preference. Massey conjures a visualization of Kirkpatrick 'swimming away from the shore of secure knowledge in the pursuit of the edition'. All the while, he is navigating the tricky obstacles of copyright and intellectual property with respect to the Ruggles Estate and the prospective publisher Ray Green. Mood is not unique in that the composer left behind a "sea of variants" of one or more works with no appearance of intentional semblance. Massey does not mince the details of Kirkpatrick's controversial construction of the piece; rather, he relies on the factual and impartial nature of archival research, embarking upon an in-depth analysis of form, source texts, and thematic content on a fine granular level which requires notational literacy and sensitivity to the materials.

If chapter five attempts to define the concept of a 'work', then chapter six tries to define the concept of 'creativity'. If we consider an edition as a collage, we must also consider the degree to which perceived independence, novelty and creative effort factor into the equation. Here, Massey's discussion revolves on Kirkpatrick's editions of prose, (5) which similarly entailed assemblage, collage, curation and presentation. The paradox between fixity and flexibility is the same as with the 'stitching together' of Mood, in that Kirkpatrick's methodical approach is characterized by piece-work and overtones of improvisation.

Lastly, the chapter "Institution: The Charles Ives Society" seeks to contextualize Kirkpatrick's admittedly tensile editorial approach within the larger context of editorial practice. In taking the Ives Society as a microcosm of the musical publishing world, Massey frames Kirkpatrick's legacy using a similarly historiographical approach in both the past and the present. Kirkpatrick's speculative approach is contrasted by the reactionary trend of transparency in paleographic work that was championed by younger Ives scholars including Peter Burkholder, James Sinclair and Henry Cowell. I would argue that the book's strength lies less on the development of a single thesis, and more on Massey's extraction of an argument in the conclusion. It gradually becomes clear that Kirkpatrick's 'artistic' method did not produce critical editions as he claimed, but rather 'performance editions' that disproportionately reflected his own personal aesthetic. Kirkpatrick and others referred to them as 'critical editions' because Kirkpatrick was often viewed as the leading expert on the material. His success as a performer-editor was a natural outgrowth of his monumental role as an authority on the twentieth-century American music landscape.

Robin Preiss

New York University

(1.) John Kirkpatrick is most famous as a virtuosic pianist and for his lifelong relationship with Charles Ives's Concord Sonata. He gave the New York premiere of the work in 1939.

(2.) According to The Oxford Companion to Music, a critical edition is "one based on scholarly evaluation and collation of sources, taking into account variant readings and innumerable aspects of contemporary performance practice." <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e2188>.

(3.) The dissemination of a score, which we can think of as a physical embodiment of the work in the printed page, can occur in a hand, on a music stand, on a shelf, in a library and arguably in the garbage.

(4.) Ives conceived the Concord as an experiment; not as a piece of repertoire for consumption by the general public. He dabbled endlessly with improvisation and revision, which contrasts interestingly with Ruggles's desire for an immortal, timeless, and frozen quality in his work.

(5.) Kirkpatrick, John. A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives, 1874-1954. New Haven: Yale University, 1960, and Ives, Charles, and John Kirkpatrick. Memos: Edited by John Kirkpatrick. Calder and Boyards, 1973.