Thought for the week: Roger Babington Hill knows the score
‘The starting point is a clear mind and a calm disposition.’
Yesterday I spent over an hour erasing pencil marks on my copy of the cello part for Dmitri Shostakovich’s wonderful Fifth Symphony which we are to play next month.
Orchestral sheet music is expensive to buy so most orchestras hire them. The copy I was working on came from a library in Hampshire. You can tell a lot about the character of the previous player from the marks they leave on the page. In this case he or she showed an overly meticulous and fussy personality indicating a lack of confidence and a fear of mistakes. They had imposed on the text a jungle of instructions to themselves so dense that the original score was almost impossible to read. There was nothing for it but to wipe out all their additions and to start again.
Among the variables that can be pencilled in are dynamics (soft or loud), tempo (fast or slow), and, for string players, bowing (up bow or down bow) and fingering (the choice of which finger to use on which string for a particular note). There is a hierarchy of authority in determining the validity of additional marks on a score. Naturally the composer ranks first. Over and above the notes themselves, composers vary in the extent to which they add further instructions. Baroque composers are usually minimalists, whereas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries directions became ever denser. Gustav Mahler was a particular culprit, adding essays of commands about how he wanted his music to be played.
After the composer, the conductor usually takes precedence in determining what marks are to be made and thus how the music is to sound. The guidance they give is followed by the ideas of the orchestra’s leader, then each section leader, ending with the ‘rank and file’ players, the orchestra’s humble foot soldiers. But much depends on the forcefulness of the character of each of these as to which marking prevails. There is not necessarily harmony between them; minor rebellions are not unknown.
As I was rubbing out the extraneous marks on my score, I thought of the parallels with reading a spiritual text and how important it is to clear out the rubbish and return to the unsullied original. Commentaries and interpretations can, of course, be helpful in guiding us to better understand what has been written, but I suggest that there is no substitute for the lectio divina approach. For this, the starting point is a clear mind and a calm disposition to allow a slow reading and re-reading of the text, time to chew it over in our minds and to meditate on possible meanings, and ample space for new understandings and insights to emerge. We can begin to allow the text to change ourselves, and from this inner change to act outwardly for the benefit of others. In this way the true value of the text can be properly sung out to the world.
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