It has been so far argued that keyboard arrangement was extremely important to the nineteenth-century musical world because it enabled a variety of works, irrespective of their original instrumentations, to move freely through domestic musical life. This claim has been supported through the examination of contem-porary accounts of arrangement in musical journals, newspapers and dictionar-ies, as well as by references made in diardictionar-ies, letters, and texts by modern histori-ans. In this chapter, another attempt to demonstrate the significance of keyboard arrangement to the nineteenth-century domestic musician will be made. What characterises this section, however, is a turning away from the kind of written sources which have already been examined and a focus instead on accounts of a more commercial nature: publication figures. The logic behind such a move is this: if keyboard arrangement was a significant part of nineteenth-century mu-sical life, it must also have been a significant part of the marketplace which sus-tained that life.
There are several valid ways in which the investigation of the relative pene-tration of the musical marketplace by arrangement practices might proceed. On the one hand, the advertisements which appeared in newspapers, journals, or on the back-pages of sheet music could be examined in order to determine what per-centage of the works being advertised there made use of arrangement techniques.
Alternatively, the advertising catalogues sent to customers by music shops could be consulted and a similar calculation performed. It would also be possible to analyse the publication lists of major musical publishing houses in order to do the same thing, or to consult the sales records of sheet music shops to see ex-actly what they sold. All of these approaches, although reasonable, would gen-erate only relatively small sample sets: the analysis would be limited by the size of the advertisement, shop, or publishing house, and the number of advertise-ments, catalogues and sales records which were examined. To provide a more compelling analysis a much larger sample is needed, a longer list of the works which were made available to consumers in the nineteenth century. This list is extant in the form of Friedrich Hofmeister’s catalogue of nineteenth-century mu-sical publications. The rest of this section will be concerned with demonstrating how Hofmeister’sMonatsberichte can be used to show that approximately 30%
of unaccompanied piano music published between 1829 and 1900 made use of techniques of arrangement.
Born in 1782, Hofmeister spent most of his working life as a music publisher based in Leipzig. In 1819, he took over the publication of the supplements to Carl Friedrich Whistling’s Handbuch der musikalischen Litteratur, a bibliography which listed all of the music and music-related publications available in German-speaking countries. In 1829, it became known as theMusikalisch-literarischer Mon-atsbericht neuer Musikalien, and henceforth appeared (nearly) every month until the end of 1900. TheMonatsberichtelisted the musical works, journals, newspa-pers, instruction manuals, and even busts and decorative pictures which were available to the musically-inclined consumer in the nineteenth century. For en-tries concerning musical works, it gives as standard the name of a work’s com-poser, its title, its price, its publication location, and its publisher. Since 2006, the entire Monatsberichte have been available online, and a simple search function allows the reader to search for works for by date, title, composer or keyword.2
By listing the bibliographic details of over 330,000 musical publications, the Monatsberichteconstitute an extremely valuable tool for tracing patterns of mu-sical publication. As the text which accompanies the online catalogue explains, theMonatsberichte“permit the dating to within approximately eight weeks of any piece of printed music listed. They are in this way an indispensable resource for the study of musical taste and publishing trends in the nineteenth century.”3 It is exactly this promise of the ability to track “musical taste and publishing trends”
which makes the Monatsberichte so significant to this project. With them, it is possible to analyse on an extremely large scale the penetration of practices of arrangement in the nineteenth-century musical marketplace.
2The database is available at ‘Hofmeister XIX’,http://hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/(accessed February 15, 2009).
3‘Hofmeister XIX: The project’,http://hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/2008/content/about/
project.html(accessed February 15, 2009).
Before any analysis can proceed, however, it must be noted that there are three significant problems associated with the use of theMonatsberichtefor this kind of work. First, it might be queried to what extent theMonatsberichtecan be used as a means to assess the actual importance of arrangement to nineteenth-century mu-sical life. The catalogues do not list, after all, the sales figures of each work; they merely indicate that a work was published. There is no evidence to suggest that the listing of a work in theMonatsberichte means that it was purchased, played, enjoyed, or indeed, had any influence whatsoever in the world beyond the limits of the catalogue.
The second problem with using the catalogue for this kind of research is that, entirely unsurprisingly for a publication which compiles a vast amount of data, it contains numerous errors. These errors were not only (intentionally) reproduced in the conversion of the catalogue into the electronic database, but it is highly likely that this process of digitisation also introduced additional mistakes not present in the original. The inaccuracies might be obvious—a spelling mistake here, a missed piece of information there—or they might be harder to spot: an incorrect date, for instance, or the wrong price. Whatever the kind of error, the risk is that they negate the accuracy of this analysis by introducing false data into the final results.
Finally, the team who oversaw the transformation of the Monatsberichte into digital form raise their own concerns with regards to the use of the records for statistical analysis. These revolve around the way in which bibliographic infor-mation has been stored in the database. Two typical lines in the catalogue, for example, read as follows:
• Kodelski (C.M.)2e Concertino p. Violon av. Acc. d’Orchestre. Oe. 2, in D.
(Déd. à Mr. Ch. Möser.) Berlin, Trautwein 1 Thlr.
• Idemav. Acc. de Quatuor. Ebend. 12 Gr.4
The first entry should be relatively clear: Kodelski’s second Concertino for vi-olin with accompaniment for orchestra, published by Trautwein in Berlin and available for the price of one thaler. The form of the second, however, gener-ates problems. Although the entry makes good sense when placed alongside the one which precedes it—the same Concertino but with accompaniment for string quartet, not orchestra—when it is placed in a database, it is forced to stand alone as a separately searchable entry. Consequently, it would not be returned by a search for pieces composed by “Kodelski”, pieces with the title “Concertinos”, pieces published in “Berlin”, and so on. This second entry is meaningless as soon as it is removed from its context, a necessary step in statistical analyses of any kind. This fact significantly affects the accuracy of any data which is extracted from the database using digital techniques: a search for pieces by Kodelski for example, would always be (at least) one entry too low because the name of the work’s actual composer has been replaced by the word “Idem”. The shorthand used in the original catalogue is, in the words of the database team, “a significant
4Taken from the January, 1840 instalment of theMonatsberichte.
limitation of Hofmeister XIX, in its current form, as a source of statistics.”5
None of these three reasons are sufficient to stop a statistical analysis of the Monatsberichtefrom going ahead. First, to counter the claim that there is no guar-antee that theMonatsberichte reflect patterns of consumption, two defences can be invoked. The weaker position would argue that an analysis based on the Hofmeister catalogues is informative, if not as an indicator of sales patterns, at least as an indicator of patterns of production: while they do not show what was consumed, the catalogues do reflect what was published. The second claim is much stronger. It would argue that the availability of a product only comes about where a market for that product exists: the more produced an object is, the more consumed it must be. It is a legitimate inference, in other words, that moves from the fact of high publication figures to the supposition of high figures of con-sumption. This thesis holds to both positions: the Hofmeister catalogues show that piano works which make use of techniques of arrangement were produced andconsumed in large quantities.
The second potential problem with Hofmeister’s catalogues—the notion that it is useless as a tool for statistical analysis because of the likelihood that there are errors within it—is based on a misunderstanding of the purposes of analysis.
Very few datasets are really perfect: from mistakes made while data is being en-tered, to respondents lying on questionnaires, no set of data can ever be said to be completely accurate. This, however, is certainly not grounds for abandoning the analysis of a dataset like Hofmeister’s catalogue altogether. By analysing hun-dreds of thousands of records in the way in which is carried out here, it is possi-ble to isolate from the data the trends and patterns which are at work in it. These trends and patterns,becausethey are based on many hundreds of thousands of records, actually obviate the significance of those pieces of data which are false or mistaken: the more records that are analysed, the less it matters that some of them are wrong. Of course, the results which are output by such an analysis can certainly never hope to be exact, but they can claim to reduce the significance of false data to such a tiny degree that the results are helpfully representative of the main and important trends.
Similar reasoning helps the defence of the use of theMonatsberichteagainst the third criticism levied at it, that the use of “Ibid.”, “Idem”, and “Ebendem” make it impossible to separate individual entries from their contexts. The total number of “Ibids” and its cognates used per year is relatively small: in 1830, for instance, only about 40 entries out of 2,000 are involved. The small size of this total is cer-tainly not a solution to the problem of how to deal with the context-dependence of the entries in theMonatsberichte, for some “Ibids” which refer to works fea-turing arrangement will slip through the search queries and not be included in the final counts of arrangement practices in the nineteenth century. However, it should raise questions about the legitimacy of ruling out statistical analysis alto-gether. If the limitations of an analysis’ claim to absolute accuracy are borne in mind, there is no reason that the catalogue cannot be quite successfully used as a source for identifying nineteenth-century publishingtrends. Producing
approx-5‘Hofmeister XIX: Help—Introduction’, http://hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/2008/
content/help/help.html(accessed February 15, 2009), original emphasis.
imate figures—all the while being extremely careful to remember that they can never be completely accurate, nor should they ever claim to be—is surely better than missing the opportunity to interrogate this valuable resource by producing no figures at all.
A final problem it is worth mentioning at this stage with regards to the use of the Hofmeister catalogue for statistical analysis is the possibility that the ana-lyst makes mistakes in conducting the analysis. To be clear: it is likely—indeed, given the factors laid out above, certain—that the absolute figures returned by the queries used here will be inaccurate. This is a result not only of the issues already mentioned—like Hofmeister’s misprints and his use of “Idem”—but fac-tors concerning specifically computational problems, like database and query design (discussed fully in appendix two). There are two responses to this ob-servation. The first is to remember that this kind of inaccuracy is to be expected from this analysis, and that the figures which are derived here do not claim to be anything other than approximations. The second—and it is really just a way of putting the first response into practice—is to refuse to deal with absolute figures at all and to focus instead on percentages. This is because where the searches ac-cidentally omit certain entries or include others, they will most likely do so when calculatingboththe total number of works produced in a yearandthe number of works making use of arrangement practices. Since a certain number of works are being included or omitted from both totals, the ratio between the two will remain representative. It is for this reason that for the purposes of graphing the output, five-year averages of these percentages are used. By approximating approxima-tions, it is impossible to be under any illusions that the results of this analysis claim to be either absolute or precise. They can, nonetheless, quite satisfactorily indicate broad patterns and interesting trends.
The process of the analysis is detailed in its entirety in appendix two. Since this is a somewhat technical account, a more approachable version is offered here.
The aim of the analysis is to calculate the penetration of the musical marketplace from 1829 to 1900 by arrangement practices; that is, to calculate what percentage of unaccompanied piano music listed in the Hofmeister catalogue for each year featured or made use of techniques of arrangement. The initial step on the path to completing this analysis is relatively simple. Calculating the total amount of piano music listed in the Monatsberichteeach year can be done by counting the number of titles listed in each relevant section of the catalogue. The next stage of the process, however—determining what proportion of this music makes use of arrangement techniques—is somewhat harder. How can one tell, based on a work’s bibliographic information, whether or not it features arrangement?
The answer involves a fact which is both convenient and interesting: conve-nient because it enables this enquiry to continue relatively easily, and interesting because it both reveals and draws on an important fact concerning the marketing of arrangement in the nineteenth century. The fact is this: nearly all nineteenth-century musical works which make use of arrangement practices refer to the fact that they are doing so in their titles. A number of examples serves to illustrate this.
• Dancla, Ch., Op. 67,Duo brill. sur l’Etoile du Nord, de Meyerbeer, p. Pfte et
Violon(Berlin: Schlesinger), 1 Rt. 5 Ngr.
• Diabelli, Ant., Op. 130,Concordance. Periodisches Werk f. Pfte u. Violine. Heft 88, 89, 2 Potpourris nach Motiven der Oper: Il Trovatore, v. Verdi(Wien: Spina), à 1 Rt.
• Baier, J,Marsch über Themas aus der Oper: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, v.
Nicolai(München: Falter), 5 Ngr.
• Opern-Bibliothek. Potpourris nach Themen der neuesten Opern. No. 81, 82, Meyerbeer, Der Stern des Nordens, arr. v. R. Müller (Leipzig: Hirsch), à 20 Ngr.6
These works all indicate that they feature arrangement techniques by naming either a source work or a source composer. Not only this, but this indication is normally carried out with the aid of one of a number of keywords, including
‘sur’, ‘über’, ‘nach’, ‘aus’, and so on. A selection of words (normally prepositions) serve as signs to the consumer that the work which he or she is purchasing makes use, at least in part, of practices of arrangement.
Given the dubious reception which arrangement has received in the twentieth century, it might be surprising to learn that in the nineteenth, works were keen to advertise their origins in another composition. Reflection, however, should reveal the fallaciousness of this logic. First, since it has been shown at length that the nineteenth-century perception of at least the keyboard edition was broadly much more positive than in the twentieth, some publishers and arrangers of at least this genre of work saw no need to conceal the fact that a piece made use of arrangement techniques. Second, works which trumpeted the name of the orig-inal on which they were based gave listeners a clearer idea of what they could expect—and thus encouraged them to part with their money—than vaguer titles likeDuo Brill.orMarsch. Third, by advertising the name of a source composition on the cover of a work which made use of arrangement techniques, publishers were attempting to make their offerings seem more valuable by virtue of asso-ciation. Finally, since arrangement was a means for circulating new music to audiences which otherwise would not have been able to listen to it, arrangement gave the consumer the chance to ‘hear’ an original—a point which any publisher or arranger would obviously want to make clear by announcing in the title the name of the work the audience had the chance to enjoy.
The use of these keywords in the titles of works which feature practices of ar-rangement is extremely useful for this analysis. By compiling a list of the words, it is possible to separate—based on title alone—the works which feature practices of arrangement from those which do not. The list of words used in this way is shown in table 3.1. By searching for these words in Hofmeister’sMonatsberichte, it is possible to calculate the percentage of keyboard works published in the nine-teenth century which made use of techniques of arrangement.
It should be observed that analysing these keywords in this manner introduces into the queries one last area of inaccuracy: the titles of some works feature one
6All taken from the May, 1855 instalment of theMonatsberichte. Emphasis mine.
arr. aus über
sur nach potpourri
motif fantasie über paraphrases
bearbeitet8 Transcriptions9 Arrangement
arrangée thème auszüge
Aufz Oper10 opéra10
Ouvertur10 Vorspiel10 Einleitung10
Table 3.1: Keywords which signal that a work contains arrangement practices.
of these keywords even though the work itself does not make use of any arrange-ment practices. In May 1855, for example, the second volume of W. Popp’s book ofNeue Liedercontains the song “Sehnsucht nach der Geliebten”.7Because ‘nach’
is a keyword in table 3.1, this song is falsely returned by the search as a work making use of techniques of arrangement. Nonetheless, checks indicate that the number of works which falsely slip through in this way is extremely low—less than 5 per year, for instance. As has already been argued, slight inaccuracies such as these do not justify the dismissal of this entire analysis.
Two more boundaries of the analysis must still be set. First, only piano music will be investigated; this is in deference to both practicality (it simply saves time) and to the historical importance of the piano as the home keyboard instrument of choice through most of the nineteenth century. While arrangements for the physharmonica or the harmonium were made at the time, it is perfectly
Two more boundaries of the analysis must still be set. First, only piano music will be investigated; this is in deference to both practicality (it simply saves time) and to the historical importance of the piano as the home keyboard instrument of choice through most of the nineteenth century. While arrangements for the physharmonica or the harmonium were made at the time, it is perfectly