Chapter Fifteen

The Performer’s Pilgrimage

to the Sources

In speaking of the performer’s pilgrimage to the sources, by source I mean

a source in the classical sense. A source is a spring, a fountain; a source is

not necessarily something fi xed. What one fi nds at a source is not a min-

eral deposit; it is something that does not stay put; it fl ows; it is in constant

motion and change. Now the term used for sources of texts is usually applied

in a much more static way. Such works, for example, as Eitner’s pioneering

Quellen-Lexicon^1 are simply listings of earliest known versions of musical texts,

whether in manuscript or in print. But in German, quelle is also a spring,

a bubbling up of water, something that is in constant self-renewal; source in

French has the same signifi cance, and I suspect that the original Latin deri-

vations for the Italian fonte are loaded with the same connotations. In other

words, we are not necessarily talking about founts as one speaks of founts^2

of type, although I suppose that there again one might think that the com-

binations and ideas that emerge from founts of type could conceivably be as

shifting and as inexhaustible as those combinations and unpredictabilities

that emerge from any source. Be that as it may, a great deal of what we are

discussing here concerns itself with sources of musical texts as far as they are

necessary and useful to the performer.

In the search for a text as the composer left it or for a text as the composer

may be believed to have intended it, there is implied a further search, and

that is the search into the composer and behind him, into his motivation, his

formation, his ambience, into the context in which he wrote his music, and

1. Robert Eitner, Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und
   Musikgelehrten christlicher Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
   (Leipzig, 1900; reprint, Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1959).


2. British spelling of font.
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