(Fr. esquisse; Ger. Skizze; It. schizzo).
A composer's written record of compositional activity not itself intended to have the status of a finished, public work. A sketch may record work in progress on a specific composition or may be made independently of any such project; while typically fragmentary or discontinuous, even consisting of no more than a few notes, a sketch may also represent a more fully worked-out musical idea. Even though a sketch might be sufficiently extensive and fully notated as to be performable, its origin as an essentially private notation distinguishes it from a composer's manuscript of a completed work (see Autograph), a document typically intended as the basis for subsequent copying and publication. The term ‘sketch’ usually refers to an idea recorded in musical notation, but may be extended to include verbal remarks or the numerical tables and rows frequently used in the composition of serial works. While some writers (see Benary, MGG2) attempt to distinguish, principally on grounds of length and completeness, between ‘sketch’ (Skizze) and ‘draft’ (Entwurf), such distinctions cannot be rigidly maintained; a distinction between sketch and draft, on one hand, and ‘fragment’, on the other, may be more tenable inasmuch as a fragment may frequently (though not exclusively) refer to all that survives of a formerly complete score, or of a score initially intended to record a complete, finished composition. This last distinction signals the relevance of any presumed compositional intent in categorizing the often overlapping functions of such manuscript sources of music. The term particella (It.) or Particell (Ger.) is sometimes used for the kind of compressed short score used by some composers (such as Schubert and Wagner) as part of the composition procedure.
The sketching of music in the senses defined above is probably as old as the notation of music itself; but the manuscript evidence, and the consequent scholarly engagement with sketch materials, is concentrated heavily in the 19th and 20th centuries. For music in the period before 1600 it is likely that much initial sketching and drafting was done on erasable tablets (cartelle), after which the emergent composition would be transferred to paper. Recent research has identified manuscripts in the hands of Fabri, de Fogliaris, Corteccia, Isaac, Palestrina, Pujol, Rore, Wert and others, which bear evidence of compositional work, including the sketching of polyphonic music in quasi-score format and the use of tablature for instrumental music (see Owens, 1997). The quantity of post-1600 sketch material that survives is not extensive for the Baroque period, but increases considerably thereafter. The quantity of material surviving in the hand of a given composer may depend not merely on the passage of time but largely on individual psychology: Brahms, despite his scholarly interest in earlier music and his possession of an important collection of autographs, habitually destroyed his sketches. By contrast, Beethoven's attachment to his sketches as opposed to autograph manuscripts was so extraordinary that his is undoubtedly the most celebrated corpus of sketches to have survived, and no discussion of the term can afford to skirt their importance.
Beethoven's sketching habits were a subject of curiosity even in his own lifetime, and it is no exaggeration to say that the branch of musicology called ‘sketch studies’ derives directly from scholarly engagement with the Beethoven sources. Several thousand sketch manuscripts survive, in a variety of physical formats ranging from single leaves or small bound or unbound bundles to professionally made sketchbooks (in so-called ‘desk’ and ‘pocket’ book formats), almost all of which were partially or totally dismembered relatively soon after the composer's death. The characteristics of the sketches themselves are also wide-ranging: although Beethoven typically worked using single-line melodic drafts, with occasional indications of supporting harmony, sketches may also consist of passages of harmony, and even, as in the case of the ‘score sketches’ associated particularly with the late quartets, approach the status of fully notated draft scores. (This last sketch type, sometimes referred to as a Brouillon although Beethoven himself seems to have used the term Concept, further illustrates the considerable functional overlap, noted above, that exists between types of manuscript evidence of the compositional process.) Even Beethoven's autograph manuscripts are typically less a post-compositional record of the finished work than the site of continuing compositional activity; as such, they may take on the status of very late sketch manuscripts. Many autographs illustrate Beethoven's dependence on a ‘cue-staff’ as a transitional notation between sketchbook and fully scored work.
The history of scholarly engagement with Beethoven's sketches – which is essentially to say, with composers' sketches – begins in the period 1860–1880, with the bibliographical and biographical labours of Alexander Wheelock Thayer and Ludwig Nohl, and above all with the work of Gustav Nottebohm, whose familiarity with the sources decisively outstripped not only that of any of his contemporaries but of anyone else for the next hundred years. The few early 20th-century figures such as Heinrich Schenker (in his Erläuterungsausgaben of the late piano sonatas) and Paul Mies (see Mies, 1925), who attempted to interpret the sketches in relation to finished works, tended to rely heavily if not exclusively on Nottebohm's partial transcriptions. Despite the inauguration, by the Bonn Beethovenhaus in 1952, of a complete edition of the sketchbooks in facsimile and transcription, the real continuation of Nottebohm's work is to be found in that of Alan Tyson, who, along with Douglas Johnson, Joseph Kerman, Richard Kramer, Lewis Lockwood and Robert Winter, began in the late 1960s and the 1970s a sustained period of intensive research into the original structure of the sketchbooks and of Beethoven's working methods. The same decades also saw the flowering of sketch studies in relation to numerous other composers, principally of the 19th century (Wagner, Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann are conspicuous examples), but also including Robert Marshall's work on Bach and Tyson's monumental contribution to the study of Mozart's autograph manuscripts and fragments. Although the 1970s and early 1980s seem in retrospect to have represented a high-water mark for sketch studies, activity in the field has remained strong, with attention being turned to Baroque opera (Rameau), late 19th- and 20th-century composers (Mahler, Wolf, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók, Honegger, Dallapiccola, Tippett and Maxwell Davies, among others) and popular music.
Of all these composers it is perhaps Mozart, whose fabled compositional facility had for so long been the stuff of popular legend, whose image has been most substantially modified by the results of sketch research. While Tyson's principal contribution has been the redating of a large number of works, and the reassignment of existing fragments to completed compositions, Ulrich Konrad's edition of the surviving sketches (in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe) provides imposing evidence for Mozart's famous claim, apropos his ‘Haydn’ quartets, that composition could be ‘una lunga, e laboriosa fatica’ (see also Konrad, 1992). Although, as László Somfai has pointed out (‘Sketches during the Process of Composition’, 1996, p.53), ‘the total quantity of surviving Mozart sketches is confusingly small compared to his output and is unevenly distributed chronologically’, this has not deterred the formation of working hypotheses concerning what one writer, in another context, has called Mozart's ‘standard operating procedure[s]’. Somfai's own major contribution to the field of sketch studies has been in relation to the music of Bartók, though he is also one of those who have tackled what little survives from Haydn's working papers. Schenker had been something of a pioneer here too, with his 1926 facsimile publication of a sketchleaf for the ‘Chaos’ music from The Creation; nor should one overlook Schenker's role, in association with the Haydn scholar Anthony van Hoboken, in the foundation of the Hoboken Photogramm-Archiv at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.
The motivations for sketch studies are various. Sketches may yield information about work chronology; and the study of a composer's working methods is broadly an aspect of biography. More controversial is the use of sketches in the completion or ‘realization’ of unfinished works (the list of such attempts includes Mahler's Tenth and Elgar's Third Symphony, as well as a putative ‘tenth’ symphony by Beethoven; Act 3 of Berg's Lulu; attempts to ‘finish’ Mozart's Requiem stretch from the late-18th-century efforts of Eybler and Süssmayr to late-20th-century attempts by Franz Beyer, Richard Maunder, Duncan Druce, Robert Levin and others). But the most common motivation has been an interest in the compositional process in relation to specific works: the ‘biography’ of the composition, as it were, rather than of the composer (though it should be obvious that ‘compositional process’ denotes a spectrum of activities far too complex to be equated simply with the writing of sketches). While any research along these lines will necessarily be partly dependent upon the survival of a critical mass of material, it also tends to proceed from a particular understanding of the composer as original creative artist and of the musical work as an organic and teleological whole. These factors, the first a matter of fortuity and the other two of ideology, have tended to dictate the choice of composers and works studied; again, Beethoven is crucial.
Although Nottebohm's was to be the seminal work, earlier reproductions of Beethoven's sketches had appeared in publications by Anton Schindler, Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried and Hermann Hirschbach dating from 1832–44; and in 1850 J.C. Lobe incorporated some of these examples into an account of the compositional process published in the first volume of his Lehrbuch der musikalischen Komposition. Lobe's account posits four ‘Procedures’ (Prozeduren), the third of which is defined as ‘vollständige Skizzirung’, while the first two are also presumed to lead to a notational record in the form of more fragmented ‘sketches’. While Lobe's incorporation of Beethoven's sketches into his modelling of the compositional process is significant in that his work significantly predates Nottebohm's publications, it would be wrong to assume that his model was based principally upon first-hand observation of Beethoven's working methods. Rather, Lobe's discussion was heavily indebted to that adumbrated by H.C. Koch in the second volume (1787) of his Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition. Koch's scheme, while deriving ultimately from the categories of classical rhetoric as reformulated in 18th-century aesthetics, stemmed more directly from J.G. Sulzer's model of the process of artistic creation in his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, first published in 1771–4. Both Koch and Sulzer recognized the role of the ‘sketch’ (Entwurf) in fixing on paper the sequence of ideas generated in the ‘invention’ (Erfindung) and the subsequent ‘plan’ (Anlage) of the composition, and both stressed that what is recorded in the ‘sketch’ relates to the overall design. In discussing the spiritual condition of the composer during the composition of the Anlage, Koch wrote (trans. from Baker and Christensen, 1995, p.187):
if the composer has invented … the principal phrases of his piece, and if they appear to him as a complete whole, connected and accompanied by their principal harmonic features; … then he should lose not a moment to put [this beautiful whole] on paper as quickly as possible so that no idea, indeed, no feature of it is blurred or even obliterated by other ideas perhaps still crowding his fantasy.
In his own account of the creative process, Sulzer (unlike Koch) had devoted a lengthy article to Entwurf, observing that ‘to sketch a work, one sets down its principal sections without working out any one of these sections, such that one sees nothing except their assemblage into a whole’ (ibid, p.64). This emphasis on the whole is also a feature of Lobe's ‘vollständige Skizzirung’, which has been described as ‘the mapping of the total structure from the resources created thus far’ (see Bent, 1984, p.41). And these various descriptions of Entwurf and Skizzirung do in fact accord well with what scholars, borrowing from the terminology developed in relation to Beethoven's sketches, call a ‘continuity draft’, a notational form in which ‘Beethoven can be seen fitting together the more fragmentary ideas made earlier into a coherent whole’ (Cooper, 1990, p.105). However, it is clear from Sulzer's account of Erfindung that notation of one's ideas was understood as an option also at this primary stage of the creative process, and presumably at any later one too.
A distinction ought to be made between the attempt, with the aid of sketches, to reveal aspects of the compositional process in a given musical work, and the attempt to use the knowledge of that process to inform an analysis of the finished work. In practice, however, the first attempt tends to shade into the second, if only because in the great majority of cases sketch studies are devoted to well-known compositions about which analytical positions have already been staked out. (The fact that the vogue for sketch studies in the late 1960s and the 1970s coincided with the rise to prominence of music analysis of a decidedly ‘formalist’ methodological persuasion should not be ignored.) Yet in the same year that Allen Forte published a pitch-class set-based analytical study of The Rite of Spring drawing heavily on the published sketches, Douglas Johnson argued strongly that sketches are of strictly biographical import and of no relevance to the analysis of finished works. Beethoven's sketches could merely confirm what could be gleaned from the work alone; or, if they differed significantly from the finished version, they ‘could be safely characterized as failed experiments’ (Johnson, 1978–9, p.15; but see also Johnson, 1998). The general response to this polemic was that Johnson's position – and especially his definition of what constitutes music analysis – was somewhat extreme, though a more recent detractor of sketch studies has even claimed that sketch analysis involves analysing the ‘non-existent’ (Griffiths, 1997, p.151). Nonetheless, publishing ventures such as the monograph series Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure, inaugurated by Oxford University Press in 1985, testify not only to a continuing fascination with sketches and other autograph sources antecedent to the definitive text of a work, but to a continuing faith in the potential for studies of the compositional process to enrich understanding of the work itself and to facilitate an engagement with those questions of ‘good and bad, good and better’ that lie in the domain not of analysis but of criticism (see Kerman, 1982, p.65).
Another writer has suggested that the usefulness of sketches to the analysis of finished compositions is related to ‘the compositional system the sketches draw upon’, and that ‘sketches are most helpful for highly defined theoretical systems’ such as common-practice tonality or serial composition (Hall, 1996, pp.4 and 11). But far from defining the relevance of sketches to the finished work, the present and future challenge may be rather to define the role of sketches and sketch studies in the context of a loss of faith in the notion of the organic, ‘closed’ work itself.
NICHOLAS MARSTON
Grove 1
MGG2 (‘Skizze–Entwurf–Fragment’; P. Benary)
G. Nottebohm: Beethoveniana (Leipzig, 1872/R)
G. Nottebohm: Zweite Beethoveniana: Nachgelassene Aufsätze, ed. E. Mandyczewski (Leipzig, 1887/R)
H. Schenker: ‘Haydn: Die Schöpfung: Die Vorstellung des Chaos’, Das Meisterwerk in der Musik: ein Jahrbuch von Heinrich Schenker, ii (Munich, 1926), 161–70; Eng. trans. in The Masterwork in Music, ed. W. Drabkin (1996), 97–105
P. Mies: Die Bedeutung der Skizzen Beethovens zur Erkenntnis seines Stiles (Leipzig, 1925; Eng. trans., 1929/R, as Beethoven's Sketches: an Analysis of his Style Based on a Study of his Sketch-Books)
L. Lockwood: ‘On Beethoven's Sketches and Autographs: some Problems of Definition and Interpretation’, AcM, xlii (1970), 32–47; repr. in Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 4–16
R.L. Marshall: The Compositional Process of J.S. Bach: a Study of the Autograph Sources of the Vocal Works (Princeton, NJ, 1972)
J. Deathridge: ‘The Nomenclature of Wagner's Sketches’, PRMA, ci (1974–5), 75–83
A. Forte: The Harmonic Organization of The Rite of Spring (New Haven, CT, and London, 1978)
D. Johnson: ‘Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven's Sketches’, 19CM, ii (1978–9), 3–17
L. Somfai: ‘An Introduction to the Study of Haydn's String Quartet Autographs (with Special Attention to Opus 77/G)’, The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Cambridge, MA, 1979, 5–51
J. Kerman: ‘Sketch Studies’, Musicology in the 1980s: Methods, Goals, Opportunities, ed. D.K. Holoman and C.V. Palisca (New York, 1982), 53–65
L. Somfai: ‘Nyersforma, kidolgozás, javitás Haydnnál (Op. 71/D-dúr vonósnégyes-menüett)’, Magyar zene, xxiii (1982), 120–28
I. Bent: ‘The “Compositional Process” in Music Theory 1713–1850’, MAn, iii (1984), 29–55
D. Johnson, A. Tyson and R. Winter: The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (Oxford, 1985)
H.A. Schafer: ‘A Wisely Ordered Phantasie’: Joseph Haydn's Creative Process from the Sketches and Drafts for Instrumental Music (diss., Brandeis U., 1987)
B. Cooper: Beethoven and the Creative Process (Oxford, 1990)
R. Winter: ‘Of Realizations, Completions, Restorations and Reconstructions: from Bach's The Art of Fugue to Beethoven's Tenth Symphony’, JRMA, cxvi (1991), 96–126
U. Konrad: Mozarts Schaffensweise: Studien zu den Werkautographen, Skizzen und Entwürfen (Göttingen, 1992)
N.K. Baker and T. Christensen, eds.: Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch (Cambridge, 1995)
P. Hall: A View of Berg's Lulu through the Autograph Sources (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1996)
L. Somfai: Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley and London, 1996)
L. Somfai: ‘Sketches during the Process of Composition: Studies of K.504 and K.414’, Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on his Life and his Music, ed. S. Sadie (Oxford, 1996), 53–65
D. Griffiths: ‘Critical Forum’, MAn, xvi (1997), 144–54 [review of A.C. Schreffler: Webern and the Lyric Impulse: Songs and Fragments on Poems of Georg Trakl (Oxford, 1994)]
J.A. Owens: Composers at Work: the Craft of Musical Composition, 1450–1600 (New York and Oxford, 1997)
D. Johnson: ‘Deconstructing Beethoven's Sketchbooks’, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Essays in Honour of Alan Tyson, ed. S. Brandenburg (Oxford, 1998), 225–35