When Joseph Haydn completed his Symphony No. 95, shortly before its first performance in 1791, he forgot to include the oboes.
Although Haydn corrected himself — his hastily scrawled ‘flauto’ and ‘fagot’ in the margin are crossed out and replaced by ‘oboe’ — this snapshot of musical history serves as an evocative reminder of human fallibility. It’s impossible to get things right all of the time, and no less so than for activities like the writing or copying of complex musical scores.
In fact, ‘mistakes’ are quite common in hand-copied texts and music. Before the introduction of printing in the late 15th century, the only means of spreading written culture was for monks and other scribes to replicate manuscripts. For music, the challenges of printing musical notation meant that hand-copying continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries.
Unwittingly, the careless scribes — and those who deliberately made changes, perhaps to fit their own style or contemporary fashions, or to ‘improve’ on an earlier literary or musical composition — were helping future historians.
Each time a piece was copied, the change was propagated, and occasionally joined by a fresh change. Scholars use these variations to build family trees of “which was copied from which” that chart the relationship between pieces, helping them to ask questions about the authors, and the history and even the movement of specific texts across continents.
Two such scholars are Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Heather Windram. Yet, they are neither historians nor musicologists. They are biochemists.
Howe is known for his work on photosynthesis and the molecular evolution of photosynthetic microorganisms. It turns out that there are important similarities between the evolution of a species and the evolution of anything copied successively — texts, music, languages and even Turkmen carpets.
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Image: Music in the tree of life
Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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Music in the tree of life
19 March 2015
Modern scientific methods for mapping the evolution of species are being applied to centuries-old hand-copied music, providing new inspiration for how it is performed.