Hooked on sheet music...

In June I wrote an essay for a new catalogue of Ostinato. Ostinato is a sheet music shop in Helsinki founded by the music students in 1978 and which is now mostly owned by the Student Union of the Sibelius Academy. When I was studying at the Academy I was a board member of Ostinato and It´s still a dear place to me. We are very lucky in Helsinki: we can still buy our music from a real shop. I´ll publish this short column as a translation by Susan Sinisalo. Something to digest for you in the beginning of a new season.


Hooked on sheet music

While in New York in April 2009, I deliberately set aside time to visit the Patelson Music House next door to Carnegie Hall on East 54th Street. Apart from showing a friend my favourite place in that city, I wanted to buy a specific edition of Mahler 1 and the orchestral parts of some Haydn symphonies.

The moment I entered the store, I realised something was wrong. There were yawning gaps on the shelves, bewildered customers wandering aimlessly around, and the staff looked as if they’d been in tears for a week. It turned out that the store established in 1954 was closing down. A major icon in American musical life was about to disappear. Apart from its phenomenal selection, Patelson’s was renowned for its expert personnel and its almost devout atmosphere. Adding to the store’s prestige were the artists visiting Carnegie Hall next door, all of whom seemed to have some business to conduct at this Manhattan mecca.

I’ve always been hooked on music shops. I remember how, as a student, it was always a thrill to be able to visit, say, Boosey’s in London or Doblinger’s in Vienna. As an Interrailer, defying the forces of gravity, I lugged around scores and sheet music you could only get by ordering them in Finland, if then. And ordering was not much fun; you need to be able to finger music and take a look at it before you buy. It’s your first introduction to a work, and hence a very solemn, sacred moment.

Nowadays ordering on the Internet is part of everyday life. I have tried to avoid this prosaic state of affairs by strolling along to Ostinato and ordering my scores from them. While I’m there, I can browse through the music they have in stock, even if I don’t really intend to buy any.

The budding pianist is already aware even at music-school age that music books differ. In one edition the same minuet will be served up with cute little bunnies, whereas in another the wig-framed face of Papa Bach may grace the page alongside the notes. But whatever you choose, the illustrations and even the quality of the paper will be indelibly engraved on your mind.

The slightly older music-college student will admire his teacher’s old, dog-eared copies of the Bach Inventions or the Mozart Sonatas. At some stage he will learn the important word “edition”. The first G. Henle Verlag edition with its blue covers seems a costly treasure, and the teacher’s notes scribbled in the margin are almost sacrilege: “make RH sing!”, “remember middle notes!”, “rhythm!”. Why this mania for spoiling the page? As if there were something wrong with the pupil’s memory.

Later, the conservatory and academy student will be simply deluged with editions. In libraries, cafés and smoking rooms he will compare Peters with Henle and Bärenreiter. “Urtext” will become a buzzword. He may seriously begin to imagine that the sheet free from all markings suggesting interpretation, infuriating illogicalities and ambiguities is somehow the greatest achievement of Western musicology and printing. The present era, intent on giving an authentic performance, tends to forget the tremendous historical and musically instructive insights afforded by, say, the Czerny or Schnabel editions of the Beethoven Sonatas.

Comparing editions and the supremacy of critical editions results in some comic behaviour. I recently performed Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto with a leading North American pianist. He had covered his ancient Schirmer copy with brown paper so that no one would notice he was not working from a critical edition. For the same reason I have torn the covers off my own, superb Dover score of “The Complete Piano Concertos by Beethoven”. We got on extremely well.

I myself find that, more and more often, my choice of edition is dictated by practical considerations. I seem to be guided more by extra-musical criteria: the quality of the paper, the binding, and especially the font. The fact that I can, in a fit of frustration, hurl the score at the wall without the binding falling apart is sometimes more important than whether the staccatos are marked with dots or wedges.

The composer’s intention is of course expressed graphically on the page, but the inner worlds of the composer, performer and listener ultimately encounter one another intuitively, in a state apart from the printed score, in the performance. Printed copies are nevertheless needed. Each generation of musicians has to buy its own copies. The fact that leading music stores are closing down is a consequence not of a crisis in the printing industry but of consumers’ changing buying habits and shops’ inability to respond to them. We may well speculate on the future of the newspaper or book, but it is unlikely that any reading device will ever replace the printed sheet of music. Otherwise, where will teachers write their instructions, violinists mark their bowings and conductors their peculiar hieroglyphics?