April Colloquium (4/20/2018)

Dear RUMS Member,

You are cordially invited to our final colloquium of the Spring semester on Friday, April 20^th at 12:30pm, in the Performing Arts Seminar Room of the Mabel Smith Douglass Library. Food and beverages will be served. The following paper will be presented:

Michael Goetjen, PhD candidate in Musicology: “Through the Fire of Imagination: The Keyboard Sketch as Mediator Between Improvisation and Composition”

In addition, elections will be held to determine next year’s RUMS officers during the meeting. Please note that you must be present at this meeting in order to vote. Bios for each nominee will be posted on our website.

Best,

The RUMS Colloquium Committee:

Michael Goetjen (Chair)

Blake Ritchie (Vice-Chair)

Michael Nokes

Through the Fire of Imagination: The Keyboard Sketch as Mediator Between Improvisation and Composition

The role of keyboard improvisation in the creative process of late 18th-century composers has long been recognized. Anecdotal evidence shows that generating ideas by improvising [phantasiren] at a keyboard instrument was an integral part of the compositional process. Mozart stated that he preferred to have a keyboard instrument next to his writing desk, and the biography of Haydn by his friend Georg August Griesinger states unequivocally that “Haydn always devised his works at the keyboard.”

Still unexplored, however, is the role that composers’ sketches played in the transference of improvised ideas to compositions in their final forms. The eighteenth-century theorist Johann Georg Sulzer offered a window into this process by framing sketches as a liminal stage, mediating between the “fire” of improvisation and the finished work. As he wrote, “sketches, when they are by the great masters, are often more highly prized than works more completely realized, for all the fire of imagination, often dissipated in the execution of the work, is to be met in them.” This creative fire, present in the act of improvisation, burns its mark onto the sketching page, and it awaits reigniting through the craft of composition.

Examining sketches of works by Haydn and Mozart in keyboard (two-staff) format, I argue that keyboard technique and the physical nature of the instrument may be discerned in sketches and traced through the act of each composition. I show, moreover, that the impact of improvising and keyboard sketching on composition was not limited to works by keyboard virtuosi such as Mozart. The keyboard sketch serves as a mediating device through which even non-keyboard works took shape.