Sketch (music)

• 1. Introduction

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  A sketch, in music, can run from a bare handful of notes to a nearly finished score. The scholar Dean says Beethoven's sketchbooks cover 'every imaginable state between unaccompanied melodic motifs of a few notes to thoroughly worked-out full scores.' Even his so-called finished works, Dean adds, still show signs that Beethoven kept on composing.

  Whether such documents survive a composer's lifetime often comes down to personal habit, and sometimes chance. Johannes Brahms routinely discarded his own sketches once a piece was finished. Mozart kept a great many of his, but after he died, some were given away to friends as keepsakes, and lost.

  So why did some composers treasure these rough drafts while others threw them away, and what can the ones that survived still reveal?

• 2. Why Composers Sketch

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  Two eighteenth century theorists, H. C. Koch and J. G. Sulzer, told composers exactly how to plan a movement before writing it. They urged composers to sketch out how a movement's themes would lock together into one overall structure, often the pattern known as sonata form. Nicholas Marston, writing in the New Grove, links their advice to what Beethoven scholars call a 'continuity draft.' Citing a 1990 study by Cooper, on page 105, Marston describes it as a notational form. In it, as Cooper wrote, 'Beethoven can be seen fitting together the more fragmentary ideas made earlier into a coherent whole.'

  Sketching also serves a simpler purpose: human memory is not perfect. A composer working out a large piece needs somewhere to store ideas before they slip away.

  That means a working sketch can capture not just a fading idea, but the entire blueprint of a piece. It does that before a single note of the final score is set.

• 3. Why Sketches Matter

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  Since the mid-nineteenth century, studying composers' sketches has counted as its own branch of musicology. Nicholas Marston, writing in the New Grove, lists three reasons the practice matters. First, the history behind how a work was created becomes evidence for a composer's biography. A sketch can show whether a piece took years of labor or came together quickly.

  Second, composers sometimes turn to another composer's sketches when trying to finish a work that composer left incomplete at death.

  Third, and above all, there is a wide interest among music lovers in how a piece actually came into being. The Oxford Dictionary of Music calls sketches 'of great fascination to musical scholars as showing the workings of a composer's mind.' Marston frames this as curiosity about, in his words, 'the biography of the composition, as it were, rather than of the composer.' He cautions that 'compositional process' denotes 'a spectrum of activities far too complex to be equated simply with the writing of sketches.'

  A fourth reason, also noted by Marston, is more contested. Some scholars appeal to a composer's sketches to support a particular analysis of a finished work, an approach that belongs to music theory. This practice remains controversial.

  That controversy means a sketch can serve as evidence for a theory. Just as easily, it can be dismissed as an early misstep sitting in an archive.

• 4. Bach's Surviving Fragments

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  In the Orgelbüchlein manuscript, Johann Sebastian Bach left an unfinished sketch of a chorale prelude titled O Traurigkeit, o herzeleid, catalogued as BWV Anh. 200. A second fragment, BWV Anh. 2, is just six bars long, an outline for a cantata written for the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity.

  BWV 149/1a is the opening instrumental movement of a cantata that breaks off right after the singers enter on a single word, 'Man.' Scholars read it as an abandoned attempt at the only Bach cantata that opens with that word, Man singet mit Freuden vom Sieg, BWV 149.

  Only nine bars survive of BWV 1059, a sketch for a harpsichord concerto. Bach arranged it from the opening sinfonia of his cantata Geist und Seele wird verwirret, BWV 35. That sinfonia had originally been scored for organ and orchestra.

  The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a notebook Bach kept for his son, holds several early versions of pieces that later became far better known. Among them is a sketch that eventually grew into the first prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

  Because that fragment breaks off after a single sung word, it still leaves open exactly why Bach set the cantata aside and started over.

• 5. Mozart's Practical Habit

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  Alan Tyson studied the watermarks on Mozart's manuscript paper and found a striking pattern. That fits a broader picture: the body of sketches Mozart left behind is very substantial. Some works sat only partly finished, in sketch form, for years at a stretch. Mozart would return and finish the piece once an opportunity to perform it came along.

  That pattern points to a business explanation: Mozart likely kept his sketches on hand as a matter of practical planning. Holding onto an unfinished piece kept the door open for a future performance or publication, even for works that did not look immediately promising.

  A sketch, in that light, was not a discard for Mozart, but an investment that might pay off years down the road.

• 6. Beethoven's Arduous Drafts

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  Antony Hopkins studied a sketch for the main theme of Beethoven's Second Symphony and said it 'bears more resemblance to a bugle-call than a symphony.' He went further, admitting he wondered why Beethoven bothered committing 'such banalities' to paper at all. Still, Hopkins concluded, it seems to have been 'an essential part of his creative procedure.'

  Hopkins's discussion, on pages 38-39 of his study, traces two further sketches for that same movement. Each one edges closer to the actual main theme that finally appears in the symphony's first movement.

  Beethoven's surviving sketches form a substantial corpus, tracing a method of work that was often slow and arduous. Commentary on his finished pieces sometimes points back to how primitive, even unpromising, the original themes looked in their first sketched form.

  That leap from a stray bugle-call figure to a finished symphonic theme is exactly the kind of transformation a sketch can make visible.

• 7. Schubert's Unfinished Works

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  The third movement of Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony survives only as an abandoned sketch. A related fragment, known as the Piano Sonata in E minor, D 769A, was left in the same incomplete state.

  Apart from his completed Third Symphony, D 200, Schubert sketched a symphony in D major at least four separate times. A fragment of just the first movement survives from an early attempt, D. 2B, formerly catalogued as D 997, thought to date from around 1811. In 1818 he sketched two movements at the piano for another D major symphony, D 615. After 1820 he got further still, sketching all four movements at the piano for D 708A. And around 1828, near the end of his life, he sketched all three movements of another D major symphony, D 936A. That work is now known as Symphony No. 10.

  The four movements of his Seventh Symphony, D 729, in E major, composed around 1821, exist only in sketch form.

  Schubert's unfinished piano music runs from rejected sketches only a few bars long to far more developed drafts with several complete movements. The Reliquie sonata is the clearest example of the latter. It survives in two stages. The first is an unfinished draft in D-flat major. The second is a four-movement version in E-flat major, which Schubert prepared for publication near the end of his life.

  In other genres too, Schubert left sketches and drafts, some abandoned, some later finished. One of his earliest songs survives only as a draft, without any text set to it. 'Das war ich,' D deest, dates from 1816 and is one of Schubert's shortest sketches, just a single melody line. He may have been considering it for a text by Theodor Körner, the same text later used for D 174.

  Schubert composed three string trios. The first two survive only as abandoned sketches. The third exists in both a draft and a finished version. His stage works include several unfinished pieces that got at least halfway complete, among them Lazarus, Sakuntala, and Der Graf von Gleichen. Other stage works, such as Rüdiger, were abandoned after only a few numbers were written.

  A work like Rüdiger, set aside after only a few numbers, closes Schubert's catalogue of sketches. It marks, quite literally, wherever a composer happened to stop.