Structure and Performance Timing in Bach's C Major Prelude (WTCI): An Empirical Study

Author(s): Nicholas Cook

Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Oct., 1987), pp. 257-272
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/854205
Accessed: 27-06-2016 07:10 UTC

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NICHOLAS COOK

STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN

BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE (WTC I):
AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

There are not many things about which most music analysts will agree; but one
of them is that there should be a close relationship between the analysis of music
and its performance. Edward T. Cone's (1962:36) statement on this subject is
perhaps the most frequently quoted: 'an analysis', he said, 'is a direction for a
performance'. But it makes equally good sense to reverse Cone's formulation
and say that a performance is a direction for an analysis; indeed Cone himself
implies as much when he goes on to say, speaking of the relationships between
events in a composition, that 'the job of analysis is to uncover them explicitly,
but they are implicitly revealed in every good performance'. The trouble is that
we have little in the way of a rigorous methodology for extrapolating from a
performance the analytical judgments, or misjudgments, that are embodied in it
- even in the case of rhythm, where (particularly in keyboard music) the
performer's power to make or mar a piece is at its height. Nearly twenty-five
years ago Peter Westergaard (1972:229) catalogued the customary failures of
rhythmic theory, and went on to suggest that these failuies 'might be remedied
by a study of rhythmic detail which, instead of assuming the bar lines of the
printed page, examines the interplay of notated compositional elements with the
unnotated means the performer uses to project accent placement . . . . Exact
information about just what the performer does at lower levels could provide
valuable clues to what the composer does on higher levels.' This essay is a
belated response to Westergaard's suggestion.
There are several reasons why the C major Prelude from WTC I makes a good
focus for such work. It is the subject of one of Schenker's (1969) best-known
studies and the classic illustration of obligatory register; but even more to the
point is its virtually complete lack of rhythmic differentiation at foreground
level. The printed page shows a steady and uninterrupted series of attacks; any
systematic variation in durations which the performer may introduce must
therefore derive from higher-level compositional structure - there is nowhere
else it can come from. In consequence, the C major Prelude makes it possible to
study the effect of higher-level structure upon rhythmic nuance without getting
bogged down in the complexities of how performers project foreground

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 NICHOLAS COOK

contrasts of rhythm; as Eric Clarke (1984:53) puts it, 'the very regularity of the
surface structure provides a context in which performers may display structure-
based performance differentiation particularly clearly'.
It is hardly possible to obtain data on rhythmic nuance in performance
without some kind of mechanical aid. There are essentially two ways in which
such data can be obtained. One is represented by the 'Iowa piano camera' of the
1930s (Henderson, Tiffin and Seashore 1936) and, in a more recent and greatly
improved form, by Henry Shaffer's grand piano interfaced to a mini-computer
(Shaffer 1981); in each case the mechanical action of the piano is the source of
information on the timing and intensity of attacks. The alternative approach,
which I have adopted, is to extrapolate performance data from an ordinary
acoustical recording of the music. Details of this system are given in the
Appendix; in brief, the sound signal is digitized and fed into a microcomputer,
which detects the increases in intensity corresponding to note-attacks and the
dynamic values associated with them. Factors such as reverberation and the
variable onset times for different tones mean that data derived from an acoustic
signal are intrinsically less accurate than those obtained directly from a piano
action, and make it impossible to analyse music of any great textural
complexity; on the other hand this system allows analysis of the performances of
internationally-known artists made under normal studio conditions - and not
just on the piano. This study is based on two commercial recordings of the C
major Prelude, one by Glenn Gould on the piano, and the other by Helmut
Walcha on the harpsichord. Details will be found in the Discography.
As it happens, an empirical study of this same prelude was made ten years ago
by the psychologist Dirk-Jan Povel (1977), using a rather similar (though not
computerized) method to detect attacks. His analysis however displays the
typical shortcomings of performance studies carried out by psychologists, in
that it takes virtually no account of the influence of musical context over
performance interpretation: Povel simply computes the mean duration of each
note in the bar, averaged over the entire prelude (with the exception of the final
three bars, where the notated rhythmic pattern changes). Figure 1 shows
Povel's results for Helmut Walcha (a), together with the results I obtained for
Walcha (b) and Gould (c); in each case the lower graph shows mean durations,
while the upper one plots the standard deviation between the thirty-two bars.
The discrepancies between Povel's results for Walcha and mine can probably be
explained by their being based on different performances; though Povel gives
no discographical details, it seems likely that his analysis was based on Walcha's
earlier recording of the WTC on EMI's Baroque label (HQS 1042-7). The
differences between Walcha's later recording and Gould's are quite striking: in
particular, Gould stresses the beginning of each bar by lengthening the first
beat, whereas Walcha builds towards the second half of the bar. However, the
high standard deviations for all three performances suggest that one should not
attach too great a significance to such mean timing profiles: as Clarke says
(1984:53), 'all significant musical structure is collapsed through the averaging
process'.

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

Fig. 1:
Deviations from durational norms averaged over bs 1-32. Standard deviations
are shown above, mean values below. In this and other such graphs the
horizontal line represents the normal value; values above the line are longer, and
values below it shorter, than the norm. The vertical line marks the ninth note of
the bar. Vertical scale (from norm-line to adjacent tics): 8% deviation from
norm

(a)

L-.

(b)

(c)

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 NICHOLAS COOK

Fig. 2:
Deviations from durational norms averaged over bs 1-4, 5-11, 12-19, 20-3, 24-
31 and 32-4, with standard deviations (above). Left: Walcha, right: Gould.
Vertical scale: 8%

JAI~

t I

ii

.el\

J
// 5

___ /_____ '\? "*",. ,.,/

- L

t2 12

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

L f

20 201

r' \-'/ -
- /..._t",
--" " - " --.., _.f -./c,. -. _ " .,.. , / ,,.. '
24 24

:3_//\32 '
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 NICHOLAS COOK

Figure 2 shows the average timing profile per bar for each of the main
structural segments of the prelude. In both performances this results in a
somewhat lower standard deviation, though Walcha's and Gould's profiles for a
given section are generally quite different. Only in bs 32-4 do the two
performers' profiles show any close resemblance; both players speed up during
the first few notes of the bar and slow down through the remainder, resulting in
an arch-like contour that corresponds to the pitch contour of bs 33-4. The first
thirty-two bars of the prelude, however, show no such direct correspondence
between pitch contour and durational profile: the second halves of these bars are
performed differently from their first halves - for instance, Walcha prolongs the
first, fourth and seventh notes of the first halves of bs 1-4, but the second, fifth
and eighth notes of their second halves. How is one to interpret such
lengthenings and shortenings of individual notes? Cooper and Meyer (1960:8)
have an answer: 'in order to obtain the desired impression of grouping, the
performer often slightly displaces unaccented beats in the temporal continuum
so that they are closer in time to the accents with which they are to be grouped
than if he had played them with rigid precision'. Applied to the first four bars of
Walcha's performance, this gives the grouping shown in Fig. 3; if one listens to
Walcha's recording, the regular grouping by threes (with a slight rhythmic
'kick' at the beginning of each bar) is just about audible, and the effect is that the
lengthened note within each group carries an emphasis - so that in the first half
of b. 1, for instance, the three Cs are brought out, and in the second half the three
Es.

Fig. 3

A21 "- _II

IV v ly iv u -vIu u -i -it u ,
fit. 4 7 .
LAP

In this instance lengthening a note gives it an emphasis; that is why

downbeats are often prolonged - for example, the initial beats of bars (Gould's
recording exemplifies this clearly). But lengthening an upbeat has a different
effect: it emphasizes the note that follows it. A very clear instance of this is
bs 30-1 of Walcha's recording, where he lengthens the Gs at note 14 of b.30 and

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

note 6 of b.31. The result however is not that the Gs are emphasized, but rather
the C and B that follow them: in other words the 4-3 suspension is brought out,
and this is reinforced when the B itself is massively prolonged at the end of b.31.
Figure 4 shows this, and also shows the contrast between how Walcha performs
these bars and how he performs the identical passsage at bs 26-7 - identical, that
is, on paper, but not in terms of musical function. Bars 30-1 express relaxation,
completing the arch-shaped dominant prolongation that began at b.24. But bs
26-7 belong to the initial, rising motion of the arch: to bring out the suspension
unduly would disrupt this rising motion. All this can be seen in the duration
contour of Walcha's performance, and heard in the recording.

Fig. 4:
Walcha, duration graphs for bs 26-7, 30-1. Vertical scale: 8%

1 / I /

,, l/1

II , , ,r ??. l' i '" ' I

/ -7 -
I I f '

)7;~T;LS ;*;*I~

Such principles can serve to create emphasis and project grouping at a more

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 NICHOLAS COOK

structural level, too. Figure 5 shows duration contours for both Walcha's and
Gould's recordings of the prelude; in each case deviations from the average
value are shown at bar, half-bar and note-to-note levels. In Walcha's recording,
but not in Gould's, the principal structural divisons (bs 5, 12, 20, 24 and 32) are
articulated as Cooper and Meyer would predict: though the effect is not always
very marked, each division is preceded by an inverted 'v' contour at the half-bar
level, representing the forward displacement of the final half-bar of the

Fig. 5:
Duration graphs at bar, half-bar and single note levels. Above: Walcha, below:
Gould. Vertical scale: 16%

I I

1 7 5 - 11 13 15 17 13 ?1 23 2 27 2- 31 3.3

5 -- -, 1 1 15 17 1 1 3 9 4 d . 3.,
1 ------1----- -1---5----- 1 1

preceding section. Such forward displacement is associated with the familiar

broadening of tempo that performers customarily use to project structural
divisions in music, which is itself an instance of a more general phenomenon
known as 'phrase-final lengthening'. Neil Todd (1985:34) defines this as 'the
tendency to slow down at the end of a single motor action or sequence' and has
suggested that phrase-final lengthening corresponds directly to hierarchical
structure. He sees the performer's task as being 'to elucidate the rhythmic
structure by (a) slowing at the structural endings and (b) reflecting hierarchical

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

structure by the degree of slowing at an ending (i.e. the degree of slowing is a

function of embedding depth)' (p.40). And he has published analyses of
performances of works by Haydn, Mozart and Chopin which show an
impressive degree of correlation between performance timing, usually at bar or
half-bar level, and musical structure as modelled by Lerdahl and Jackendoff's
time-span reductions.
Figure 6 shows Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983:263) prolongational
reduction of the C major Prelude. (The prolongational, rather than time-span,
reduction is chosen because the performer's timing can be expected to reflect his
knowledge of the tensional morphology of the composition as a whole, which is
what the prolongational reduction is intended to embody; but it makes little
difference in practice whether one chooses the prolongational or the time-span
reduction of this prelude, since the two reductions are very similar to each other,
as also to Schenker's analysis.) The solid bars beneath the prolongational
reduction indicate the hierarchical depth of the various structural divisions in
Lerdahl and Jackendoff's analysis, and according to Todd's hypothesis these

Fig. 6:
(a) Prolongational reduction of the C major Prelude
(b) Schematic representation of the hierarchical depth of phrase boundaries
(c) Principal phrase-final lengthenings in performances by (in descending
order) Gould, Schiff, Richter, Thomas, Landowska, Walcha, Newlin

(a)

-- ------ --- --- -- ----

II I 1FA
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 NICHOLAS COOK

would be projected through a corresponding lengthening of the preceding

phrase-end, probably at the bar or half-bar level. But a comparison between
Figs 5 and 6 shows that the correlation between the prolongational reduction
and the performers' timing is not particularly good: Walcha, for instance, barely
articulates what Lerdahl and Jackendoff see as the principal structural division
of the piece at b.20, whereas Gould articulates this division but not those at bs 12
and 24. And if other performances are included in the comparison as well, the
picture becomes less rather than more clear. The graph at the bottom of Fig. 6
shows the main phrase-final lengthenings in seven recorded performances of the
prelude. Of these only three (all pianists, as it happens) articulate the division at
b.20, whereas five articulate the subordinate divisions at bs 12 and 24. There is
a good deal of other variation as well, the most interesting, or outlandish, of
which is to be found in Wanda Landowska's recording.
Some of this variation can be understood in terms of the different possible
interpretations of the prelude's periodic structure. The normal nineteenth-
century interpretation of the prelude, represented for instance by Czerny's
edition, interpolated an extra bar between 22 and 23. The effect of this is that the
whole of the prelude can be understood as a regular and unbroken series of four-
bar periods; this throws the divison at b.20 onto a weak bar, making it difficult
to project this as a decisive structural point (there is nothing to mark it as such in
Czerny's edition). When considerations of authenticity led to the deletion of the
spurious bar, it became easier to project b.20 as a structural point (Busoni
marked it with a double barline in his edition) but the rhythmic transition
between the opening - which is clearly a downbeat - and b.20 had to be
accounted for in some way, either through a three-bar period or a one-bar
elision. Schenker's solution to the problem, shown by the numbers in the
foreground chart of his analysis, was to regard the opening four bars as an
expansion of the first bar; this is an elegant idea, but it leads to the strange
phrasing Schenker recommended in his letter to Felix-Eberhard von Cube
(Drabkin 1985:246), according to which bs 4-5, and again bs 6-7, are linked
together with a diminuendo. Such considerations may lie behind Landowska's
curious, and I think rather objectionable, caesurae at the end of bs 5 and 7,
which achieve the same grouping through rhythmic rather than dynamic
nuance. Most performers, however, seem to locate the transition somewhat
later. In their time-span reduction of the prelude, Lerdahl and Jackendoff
(1983:262) read an elision at b.8; this is what Gould projects in his performance,
and he does it in such a way as to create what Cooper and Meyer would call a
rhythmic reversal at bs 9-10. Figure 7 explains this, and shows how Gould's
interpretation is expressed in the dynamics of his performance.
Why should the correlation between hierarchical structure and phrase-final
lengthening be more erratic in performances of the C major Prelude than in the
pieces Todd studied? The answer possibly lies in the fact that Todd was using
music, like the opening of Mozart's A major Sonata K.331, that has a great deal
of surface articulation. The implication of this is that what phrase-final
lengthening actually reflects is not hierarchical structure but surface

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

Fig. 7:
Gould, intensity graph of bs 5-13, with rhythmic groups

5 7 I i1 12 13
I ,
L2eZ Ile ZI LZZ i2(fL i

articulation; this comes to the same thing when the hierarchical structure is
projected by means of surface articulation, but means something quite different
in the case of a piece that lacks such articulation, such as the C major Prelude.
However, there is also another sense in which it may not be appropriate to seek,
as Todd does, more or less one-to-one correlations between surface nuances and
structural boundaries. Indeed such an approach smacks of over-determinism,
in that it is based on the model of an ideal performance which any actual
performance will approximate to a greater or lesser degree; whereas what would
seem more appropriate would be to correlate hierarchical structure with some
kind of durational framework within which different surface realizations would
be possible. In other words, one might expect middleground pitch structures to
be realized through middleground durational spans; indeed it is impossible to
explain the lack of conformity between performances of the C major Prelude in
any other way. (Bear in mind that Walcha's and Gould's performances do not
have even one of their major phrase-final lengthenings in common.)
If there is an invariant durational framework within which rhythmic nuance
takes place, then it is likely to be discovered more readily through the
comparison of a number of different performances than through the analysis of
one in isolation. The question is whether there is some way of segmenting the
music such that each segment has the same durational value in any given
performance ('durational value' meaning value in relation to the overall tempo
of the individual performance, not an absolute value). For example, if one
compares the overall durational contours of Walcha's and Gould's performances
at a bar-to-bar level, one finds considerable differences between the two (Fig.
8a, b); as Fig. 8c shows, the standard deviation between them is quite high. It is,
however, possible to discern a similar contour in both performances that
underlies the various local deviations which the performers (particularly
Walcha) introduce; each performance begins with relatively short durational
values (or, to put it another way, at a relatively fast tempo), broadens out around
b.20, approaches normal values for the dominant prolongation of bs 24-31, and

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 NICHOLAS COOK

Fig. 8:
(a) Walcha, durational contour. Vertical scale: 8%
(b) Gould, durational contour. Vertical scale: 8%
(c) Standard deviation between (a) and (b)
(d) Gould, intensity contour

(a)

1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33

(b)

1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33

1 5 3 13 17 21 25 29 33

1 5 9 13 17 21 25 23 33

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

slows down at the end. Figure 8 also shows the overall dynamic contour of
Gould's performance, a contour which is quite conventional (it broadly
corresponds to the markings in both Czerny's and Busoni's editions) and which
in general has an inverse relationship to the durational contour: with the
exception of the dominant prolongation, louder means faster.
The smoothness and directed motion of this underlying durational contour is
a clear indication that it is under the performer's control, rather than being
simply the result of random fluctuation. In other words, the performer keeps
the rubato of his performance within the framework of a larger-scale durational
organization. And it could be the case that this underlying durational contour is
the largest scale at which performance timing is organized, so that local
deviations such as Walcha's speeding up at b. 14 and slowing down at b.23 are
simply superimposed on it; that would mean that such local deviations resulted
in a shortening or lengthening of the overall performance time. Comparison of
Walcha's and Gould's performances, however, suggests that within a given
structural segment such deviations cancel each other out, so that the overall
durational value of the segment remains the same. Figure 9a shows the degree of
correlation between the two performances when the relative durations of entire
structural sections are compared; the standard deviation is low, and the
durational profile shared by both performances is a characteristic one, with each
section having a different durational value and with the central vector of the
contour corresponding to the most intense section of the composition (bs 20-4).
Although the segmentation adopted in Fig. 9a is consistent with both
Schenker's and Lerdahl and Jackendoff's analyses of this prelude, it may not be
the most suitable for the present application. The reason is that, as I said, a note
or a section may be emphasized both by lengthening the note or section itself
and by lengthening the note or section that precedes it. But the segmentation
given in Fig. 9a divorces any given section from the lengthening which precedes
it and is supposed to reflect the section's structural status. Therefore it might be
more logical to shift the divisions a little earlier, so that each section takes in the
entire prolongation associated with it. Fig. 9b does this; it also follows Schenker
rather than Lerdahl and Jackendoff in locating the final structural division at
b.35 rather than 32, so projecting both the unity of bs 24-34 as a prolongation of
2 and the obligatory register of the composition as a whole. On the basis of such
a segmentation the standard deviation between the two performances is
virtually eliminated.
This correspondence between the two performances suggests that just as
foreground rubato is organized within the durational contour of the
composition, so the durational contour itself may be organized around
durational values associated with the composition's structural segments; these
segments would represent the highest level at which the piece has a specifically
durational organization - a middleground rhythmic structure that remains
invariant despite the differences between performances as regards style,
dynamics and even instrument. However, one should bear in mind that
precisely because the underlying durational contours of Walcha's and Gould's

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 NICHOLAS COOK

Fig. 9:
Mean durational values per segment with (above) standard deviations. Vertical
scale: 8%

(a) ----

1 5 12 20 25 32

(b) t[

1 4 11 19 24 34

1 8 15 22 26

performances are so similar, any segmentation of the piece is likely to give a low
standard deviation - even a clearly inappropriate segmentation like that shown
in Fig. 9c. To be sure, the fit is not as good as in Fig. 9b; but the difference is less
than overwhelming. So it may be that it is the durational contour, rather than
the durational values associated with specific structural spans, that matters in
the organization of performance timing; indeed it is conceivable that neither is
of significance, and that the correlations between Walcha's and Gould's
performances of the C major Prelude would not extend to any other
performances. I do not propose to speculate about this; it is simply a question of
facts, and more facts are needed before any decision can be reached. But if it

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 STRUCTURE AND PERFORMANCE TIMING IN BACH'S C MAJOR PRELUDE

were indeed the general case that stylistic nuance is organized on the basis of
middleground time-spans, then some useful conclusions could be drawn. For
instance, it would lend some support to Cooper and Meyer's concept of a
rhythmic accent being something that has temporal extension - a concept that
has been widely attacked on the grounds that an accent should correspond to a
time-point, not a time-span (see for example Schachter 1976:306, Benjamin
1984:383). Furthermore, it would constitute an application at middleground
level of the eighteenth-century concept of tempo rubato, as expounded for
instance by C.P.E. Bach. The essence of Bach's conception of rubato was that
it should be contained within the framework of metre: as Maury Yeston puts it
(1977:95), 'since it is against a strict metric support that the rubato part plays,
the length of the bar is clearly meant to remain substantially the same. Thus any
note that is given added duration in the rubato part will likely "steal" its
temporal increment from another note that is correspondingly shortened'. This
appears to be an accurate description of how Walcha and Gould perform the C
major Prelude, except that the framework within which they operate is provided
not by metre but by a series of higher-level durational values that directly
expresses the music's form.

APPENDIX

This research used a custom-designed system for detecting note-attacks and their
associated intensities on the basis of a normal acoustic recording of the music. Music
signals were routed to an 8-bit analogue-to-digital converter operating at a sampling rate
of 4 KHz. The ADC was interfaced to a Hewlett-Packard Integral microcomputer
running under the HP-UX 5.0 operating system. The digitized signal was scanned and
an attack detected whenever the absolute intensity value corresponding to a given span
of samples exceeded that of a previous span of samples by a given proportion and/or
increment; in the present instance the span length was set at 80 samples, and the test was
repeated every 40 samples, giving a maximum resolution of 10 msec. Owing to effects
of reverberation, surface noise and so forth, this procedure generally resulted in the
detection of some spurious attacks, and for this reason an additional facility provided
on-screen editing on the basis of a graphic representation of the digitized signal. The
resulting record of attack times and intensities was stored on disc, and further routines
provided analysis of this information in numerical and graphic form. I should like to
thank the Electronic Services Unit of Hong Kong University for designing and
manufacturing equipment used in this project.

REFERENCES

Benjamin, William E., 1984: 'A Theory of Musical Meter', Music Perception, Vol. 1,
pp.355-413.
Clarke, Eric, 1984: 'Structure and Expression in the Rhythm of Piano Performance'

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 NICHOLAS COOK

(Diss., University of Exeter).

Cone, Edward T., 1962: 'Analysis Today', in Problems ofModern Music, ed. P.H. Lang
(New York: Norton), pp.34-50.
Cooper, Grosvenor, and Meyer, Leonard B., 1960: The Rhythmic Structure of Music
(Chicago: University of Chicago).
Drabkin, William, 1985: 'A Lesson in Analysis from Heinrich Schenker: The C Major
Prelude from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I', Music Analysis, Vol. 4,
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DISCOGRAPHY

Gould, Glenn (piano): CBS/Sony OODC 120-3

Landowska, Wanda (Pleyel harpsichord): RCA Victor LM-1047
Newlin, Anthony (harpsichord): CBS/Sony M2 32500
Richter, Svatoslav (piano): Eurodisc 610 276-234
Schiff, Andras (piano): Decca 414 388-2
Thomas, Michael (clavichord): Saga PSY-5A
Walcha, Helmut (harpsichord): Archiv 2565 081

272 MUSIC ANALYSIS 6:3, 1987

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