I Need a Semicolon Here: Punctuation in Instrumental Chamber Music

H istory has left its residue in punctuation marks—and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.”
  — Theodor Adorno, Punctuation Marks.

W hen punctuation was first employed, it was in the role of handmaid of prose; later, the handmaid was transformed by the pedants into a harsh-faced chaperone, pervertedly ingenious in contriving stiff regulations and starched rules of decorum; now, happily, she is content to act as an auxiliary to the writer and as a guide to the reader.”
  — Eric Partridge, You Have a Point.

    [50-sec clip, Maxence Larrieu, C.P.E. Bach, Sonata for Flute or Violin and Continuo in G minor (BWV 1020), Adagio, 1.8MB MP3]

I was recently listening to C.P.E. Bach’s (or maybe J.S. Bach’s) Sonata in G minor for flute and continuo (BWV 1020), performed by Philadelphia-based Mimi Stillman on flute and Jeremy Gill on piano. Mimi’s playing was flawless, a near-miraculous realization of the coherence and feeling of the piece. But, in the Adagio, I found myself wishing for Gill to phrase his part more like Raphael Puyana did in the Maxence Larrieu 1994 Philips recording of this piece—more hesitantly, abstractly, resignèdly. Gill’s interpretation was technically fine, but the affect—the emotion—seemed a bit ‘flat’ to me.

What I was wishing for in the continuo part was something more like the Maxence Larrieu-Raphael Puyana phrasing——something more like the dour, contemplative phrasing that Glenn Gould used, for J.S. Bach’s Sarabande in D minor from French Suites No. 1 (BWV 812)—something that would’ve lent more of a dialogue effect to the interaction between the flute and the harpsichord. Each of us, I suppose, is entitled to his/her odd attachments to particular styles and interpretations.


Basically, I was wishing Gill had been applying more ‘semicolons’. A colon says, ‘Pay attention. This next bit I want to emphasize.’ But a semicolon is like politely clearing your throat. The semicolon says, ‘There’s still some caveat or paradox that I need to explain to you. There is a reservation I have about what I just said—something more you should know about.’ The semicolon speaks to the other performer(s), as well as to the listeners. What I wish is that we musicians added some new punctuation marks to our annotations of music—especially the semicolon.

A phrase that ends on a higher note than it began, followed by a rest (pause)—just as your voice does if you ask a question in Western languages—must almost certainly construed as a musical query (by Western players and listeners). Similarly, a phrase with a lower-pitched ending note gives the phrase a finality or semantic ‘terminal’ quality, just as when a question is answered—and is almost certain to be construed as declarative.

T here is a limit to the information any language can convey without introducing such devices as quotation marks that differentiate between what logicians call ‘language’ and ‘metalanguage’.”
  — E.H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion.

Q uotation stands at the intersection of Iconography and Intertextuality.”
  —  Michael Bal, Quoting Caravaggio.

Paragraphs, sentences with primary and subordinate clauses, and so on—all of these have near-equivalents in music. Once, 150 years ago, Robert Schumann had a dream of a “higher poetic punctuation in music, liberated from the tyranny of the measure.” Well, of course beyond bar lines, we have:

• Rests
  
• Ligatures
  
• Cadences
  
• Commas (above the staves, to indicate phrasing; breath marks)
  
• Fermatas
  
• Pedaling marks (for keyboard instruments)
  
• etc.

But, except for some new-music compositions, fewer and fewer chamber music pieces have ‘adequate’ annotation as to phrasing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wishing for obsessive instructions via more punctuation markings. It’s just that I think composers (and publishers’ copy-editors and typographers) have tended to under-value the artistic value of the commas and other markings. Jennifer Brody, Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, and Performance Art, at Northwestern University in Chicago captures perfectly the aesthetic/expressive sense that I have in mind.

D isagreeing with e.e.cummings’s poem ‘since feeling is first’ [‘life’s not a paragraph / and death i think is no parenthesis’], I argue that punctuation can be thought of as a matter of life and death as well as embodiment.”
  — Jennifer deVere Brody, Punctuation, p. 2.

Jennifer Brody’s nice new book recommends that punctuation need not be a handmaid or a chaperone but instead should be regarded as art in its own right. She does note that excessive punctuation can be a defect (stilted or overly affected or controlling). But liberal amounts of punctuation can be a valid element of performative style—extending the reader’s/performer’s power to interpret freely in broader ranges of expression [broader than an unannotated score may evoke]. Her treatment of ellipsis—which appears… to de-compose the page and speech [or musical utterances], and which leads to enigmatic or contra-dictory ends—is especially good. She uses Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ jazz idioms to reveal the blackness of Blackness and gender and racial dis/enfranchisement—encapsulated in phrasing marked by cadences and punctuation. Every bit of what Jennifer has to say about Ellison and jazz has direct correlates in discursive chamber music idioms.

A nd Death shall be no more;
Death, thou shalt die!”
  — John Donne, Holy Sonnet No. 6, inept edition.

A nd death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
  — John Donne, Holy Sonnet No. 6, Gardner edition, quoted by Brody, p. 142, remarking on the effect of substituting a comma—how a semicolon is too theatrical in this context and, along with the line-break and exclamation point, ham-fistedly destroys Donne’s implied,subtle, aporetical meaning. Omitting the comma of address in the second phrase of the preferred Gardner version lends a hebephrenic inertia that’s consistent with Donne’s pervading fatalism and is also an elegant, coherent cadence.

Remember: National Punctuation Day is fast-approaching. More important than that, though, is the National Flute Association’s annual meeting, which this year is held in Kansas City at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It begins today and runs through Sunday. There are several conference sessions and performances specifically devoted to the chamber music repertoire for flute. See you… there! (Full stop.)

I grew up with a lot of punctuation myself, so I can understand your nostalgia for parentheses,’ the dashing Sister Ka exclaimed to her dingbat friend across the periodic table.”
  — Harryett Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary.

• Mimi Stillman website
  
• Mimi Stillman on YouTube
  
• Stillman and Gill on WGBH’s ‘Classical to Go!’ podcast [mp3]
  
• Maxence Larrieu, Professor emeritus at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève
  
• National Punctuation Day (24-SEP) [U.S.]
  
• Conley C. A semicolon’s dream journal. OneLetterWords blog.
  
• Adorno T. Punctuation marks. In Notes to Literature, Vol. 1 (ed., R. Tiedemann; tr. S. Nicholsen). Columbia Univ, 1991.
  
• Bal. M. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Univ Chicago, 1999.
  
• Brody J. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Duke Univ, 2008.
  
• Derrida J. Ellipsis. In Writing and Difference. Univ Chicago, 1981.
  
• Ellison R. Invisible Man. Vintage, 1981.
  
• Gombrich E. Art and Illusion. Princeton Univ, 2000.
  
• Hammond A. The noisy comma: Searching for the signal in Renaissance dramatic texts. In Crisis in Editing (ed., R. McLeod). AMS, 1994.
  
• Katz R. (Dalhaus C, ed.) Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music, Vol. 3: Essence. Pendragon, 1992. (esp. pp. 583ff.)
  
• Larrieu M. Bach Flute Sonatas. (Philips, 1994.)
  
• Mathews W. How to Understand Music: A Concise Course in Musical Intelligence and Taste. Library Reprints, 2001.
  
• Merchant J. The Syntax of Silence: Sluicing, Islands, and the Theory of Ellipses. Oxford Univ, 2001.
  
• Mullen H. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Univ California, 2002.
  
• Parkes M. Pause and Effect. Univ California, 1993.
  
• Partridge E. You Have a Point There: Punctuation and Its Allies. Routledge, 1978.
  
• Perry E. Rubato playing. in Mathews W. Music, Its Ideals and Methods: A Collection of Essays. Presser, 1897. (pp. 285-92.)
  
• Ronell A. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Univ Nebraska, 1989.
  
• Sedwick E. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke Univ, 2003.
  
• National Flute Association (Convention in K.C. 07-10 AUG)
  
• DSM. On stylized naturalism: Chamber music of Elliott Carter. CMT blog. 25-JUL-2008. [rubato]