Bethany Lowe
University of Plymouth

I. Notes on notes

Many recordings of music, released in the form of a CD, cassette, or record, carry a programme note, also known as a sleeve note or liner note. Such notes are intended to introduce listeners to the genre or work - and in some cases, the performance - guide them through it, and impose on them a culturally 'correct' way of perceiving the music. The relationship between the writings on the cover and the sonic contents, however, are still open to question. Is there any correlation between the interpretative choices made by the performer and those conjured up by the writer? Do successive sleeve notes for the same work have a diachronic connection with each other, or any interaction with other types of written materials? And what ideological work are the writers of sleeve notes trying to accomplish? These are some of the questions I'm hoping to address in this article.

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Programme notes for live concert performances have been defined by Christina Bashford as 'printed words addressed to audiences', sometimes 'accompanied by thematic material printed in music type'[1] and by Nigel Simeone as 'a written commentary [...] intended to inform the listener about the music to be performed'.[2] The historical role of programme notes, for Bashford, was 'in developing music appreciation and in shaping listening practices', and thus she claims that they made 'a significant contribution to the delineation of high musical culture' in the 19th century.[3] Writers on programme notes generally remark on their distinctively British origins, a situation which Catherine Dale attributes to a nineteenth-century combination of inadequate analytical education and Victorian didacticism.[4] It is also common to note their open-ended relationships with other forms of creativity such as composition, performance, analytical writing and hermeneutics, art and design, advertising, reviewing, broadcasting, and dictionary-writing and other educational work. As Bashford describes it, there is a network of relationships articulated through these notes,[5] such that 'The history of the programme note is inevitably entwined with other aspects of British cultural life'.[6]

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The notes attached to recordings have attracted less definition, though Simeone observes that they tended initially to be 'similar in style to the concert programme notes of the time'.[7] Terms for these materials include sleeve note, liner note, disc note, or album note - though the generic term 'programme note' is not inappropriate. Colin Symes, who has given them a more thorough consideration in his book Setting the Record Straight, notes that they

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occupy a modal universe different from that of the record[ing], and much of their efficacy as a textual form depends on their capacity to accord with its contents and minimize any distortion that might flow from transferring between modes of 'meaning'.[8]

Symes argues that 'sleeve notes, like cover designs, act as mediating texts that provide a particular reading of the music that interposes itself between the loudspeaker and the listener'.[9] They can thus be construed as part of the work's paratext, elements which 'lie on the threshold of the text and which help to direct and control the reception of a text by its readers'.[10] In his book Paratexts, Gerald Genette describes the function of these liminal elements in terms of both a transition and a transaction.[11] In the case of a book, paratextual material typically includes titles, prefaces, and notes, elements that deploy predominantly the same mode of discourse as its text, namely written prose, and are hence peritexts; but due to the ambiguous notion of 'a recording' as signifying either the bare sound trace or the whole commercial package, sleeve notes can be thought to exist either within or without its threshold, and hence are arguably a mere accompanying epitext to the sounding performance.[12] Whether the sleeve note is integral or accompanimental to the recording is an ambiguity inherent to the genre, and the recordings investigated in this article will be found to take up varying positions along this continuum.

Sleeve notes serve to introduce a wide range of potentially unfamiliar works and styles to listeners whose identity is unknown by the writers. As such their function is both educational or enlightening, in serving to give a leg-up to those without more specialist knowledge, and commercial, in that it aims to draw in a greater number of listeners than the bare sound trace might be able.[13] They have been pivotal to the commercial and intellectual success of various types of music since the onset of recording, including 'early music', whose scholarly packaging formed a key part of its connoisseur image in the latter part of the twentieth century,[14] and 'world music', whose acquaintance with European audiences in recent decades has been facilitated primarily through accompanying sleeve notes.[15] As Beverley Parker points out in her case study of South African music, the notes accompanying both concerts and recordings have the power to affect our perception of music's aesthetic value as either art or artifact, and function as part of the cultural system's 'machine for making authenticity'.[16] In particular, Parker points out that the process of providing a structural analytical commentary with the music recording can work to catapult a musical artifact into the realm of art, with a consequently higher status available to attach itself to the listening public.[17]

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In the case of large formally-complex classical works, sleeve notes that contain analytical description might be thought to manipulate the listener's perception in ways that are particularly intimate to the fabric of the soundscape. Analytical writings typically parse a piece, providing points of articulation and grouping structures to enable a listener to navigate more confidently what may be an intricate and lengthy slice of music. However, as Nicholas Cook has pointed out, formal analytical publications, in the form of books and articles, form part of the reception network 'only for the small minority of musically educated listeners. Others must avail themselves of the potted biographies and analyses on the backs of record sleeves'.[18] Sleeve notes thus work at the sharp end of music-analytical discourse reception, since their immediacy and wide circulation enhances the influential power of these writings upon listeners.

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In contrast with interpretations presented in free-standing books and articles, each attempt to lead the listener towards a given understanding of the work, provided as a sleeve note, is packaged physically together with a particular recorded performance. Sleeve notes function successfully because people tend to 'assimilate what they see and what they hear into a composite experience', a process which is possible because of music's 'openness to semantic completion'.[19] When the note and the performance seem to be working together to create an interpretation, an interesting synergy takes place which Cook has referred to as a 'domestic Gesamtkunstwerk'.[20] This synergy is a manifestation of the holistic way in which an individual builds up a mental representation of any piece of music through exposure to a variety of experiences.[21]

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This composite perceptual experience, though, is challenged on occasions when the written interpretation affixed to the record cover bears no relation to, or explicitly appears to contradict, the approach taken by the musical performers. This situation can be caused by genuine differences of interpretation between the note author and the performer, which pull against each other to persuade the listener of their validity. However it is in other cases the result of variations in the practical process of note-writing: a causal one-to-one relationship between a recording and its accompanying text, which may be thought normal or ideal for investigating the connection between them, does not always prevail. Sometimes note authors are given a version of the recording to respond to, so that their text forms a gloss to the performance (congruent or otherwise), while others produce their copy without hearing the performance that it will sit alongside.[22] Only in certain (artistically privileged) cases do note authors get the chance to collaborate with the performers to produce an integrated musical statement. A one-to-many relationship often arises where a recording is reissued - perhaps much later in time, perhaps in a different format - and receives a new sleeve note; a many-to-one relationship is evident where a programme note is recycled and a writer submits only a marginally-altered text for what may be a very different performance; and plenty of recordings have no narrative material at all. A certain casualness of authorship is to some extent in the nature of the programme note convention: recycling, plagiarism, and anonymity were common in the culture of early concert programme notes,[23] and likewise the exact process of formulation of a particular sleeve note cannot always be traced.

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Despite these inconsistencies of creative intention in the pairing of sleeve notes with performances, their association into a single physical object binds them into a symbiotic relationship (whether harmonious or incongruous) in the listener's reception. Thus it is worth starting to ask questions of sleeve notes, their function, and their writers, and draw some likely conclusions from the available information about their relationship to the sound recording, their audience, and its cultural context.

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To further complicate matters, a sleeve note may make reference to critical, analytical, or informative texts that are outside the apparently closed circle of the performance and its commentary - depending on the author's style, the available word-count, and the imagined audience. Notes often thus perform something of a 'bridging' function, not only in the conventionally-supposed manner from the composer (or performer) to the listener, or between performance and the written word, but also between scholarly monographs, opinion-setting record reviews, and the exoteric functionality of record packaging.[24] They can reach beyond the single performance to contribute greatly to the 'field of the piece' as it exists in the minds of its potential listeners. Thus in seeking to understand programme notes we should always consider broader patterns of influences; notes can do powerful work as a dissemination outlet for scholarship or other kinds of specialist knowledge, and as such, bring these into contact with the so-called 'ordinary' or middlebrow listener.  

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II. Sibelius's Fifth Symphony and the set of recordings & sleeve notes

The case study for this article, namely the set of sleeve notes attached to Sibelius's Symphony No. 5 in a selection of contrasting recordings released in Britain over a sixty-year timespan, illuminates a cultural network that is both wide-ranging and closely-knit. These notes connect, in a close and intricate set of relationships, with the recorded performances themselves, but also with further 'epitexts' such as record reviews and published analytical writings on the work in question, since they touch on related issues and shared concerns.

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The first of the three movements of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony presents various structural and interpretational ambiguities, and hence is ideal for tracing patterns of connection between performances, sleeve notes, academic writings, and record reviews, through all of which one can see distinctive interpretative opinions circulating. In particular, writers of analytical monographs on Sibelius's symphonies are intrigued by whether this section of music (the first 586 bars of the work) consists of a single complex movement, or two joined together, with surprising energy being expended on the subject, in their efforts to understand the compositional logic of the work and hence the composer's modernistic and/or classical credentials.[25] The piece itself opens with a rising horn figure within a Tempo molto moderato and gradually moves through a series of tempo increases, modulations, and thematic and stylistic reworkings, including a distinctive passage with trumpet fanfare at bar 106, which writers have generally viewed as either an (altered) recapitulation to the first movement, or a new (albeit interlinked and related) scherzo movement.[26] My work in analysing the tempo of recordings using empirical methodology produces graphs which show that the movement delineation debate also has relevance for performers of the piece, since their performances are found to fall into distinct interpretative patterns which suggest either a one- or a two-part interpretation and/or other clear structural features.[27] The function of programme notes (identified by Catherine Dale) 'to serve as a guide to the listener, a charting of an aural journey through the work which [draws] attention to features of particular interest and structural and textural landmarks along the way'[28] is a function which is particularly valuable and influential in the case of such an ambiguous piece.

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Of the 43 recordings originally studied, three had no sleeve note, and in another nine the sleeve note made no particular comment about the movement structure or form.[29] The remaining 31 recordings with relevant programme notes are listed below in Table 1, a discography which gives the names of the conductors and original release dates for reference, and the names of note writers and the particular release version of the recording used.[30] Within this group, a variety of interesting relationships pertain between the structural interpretation demonstrated in a performance and that described in the attached note, as will be explored. Furthermore, a number of discursive strategies start to emerge from examining the set of sleeve notes as a whole. For instance, the first, 1915 version of the symphony had four separate movements instead of three overall, the first two of which were melded together in the subsequent and final revisions of the piece (in 1916 and 1919) to give this complex compound structure; when this information becomes generally known in English-speaking circles,[31] it sets some kind of precedent for writers of two-movement schemes in the programme notes to argue that this is the 'real' structure of the work and the division can still be felt in the final version, whilst those who prefer one-movement schemes either ignore this information or explicitly dismiss its tangibility or relevance (as will be seen presently).

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Many authors in the set of notes, as might be expected, propound both sides of the structural argument more-or-less equally, taking either a neutral or an agonistic tone (typically making comments such as how 'unusual' the form is); I have identified these as making a rhetorical gesture of 'hedging', in the sense of avoiding committing oneself or of counterbalancing a bet.[32] The 'either-or' approach to formal categorisation takes place without reference to previous models of fused multimovement forms (such as Liszt's B minor sonata or Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony) which are the mainstay of later scholarly comparison;[33] instead the piece is set against a 'normative' sense of sonata form,[34] in keeping with the traditions of programme notes and the presumed knowledge levels of the readers.[35] It is common for a writer to start with a hedging position on the form of the Sibelius and move towards a clear statement of a one- or two-movement interpretation - or vice versa, stating their point of view and then qualifying it with secondary possibilities - and both of these hedging manoeuvres can be found either lightly or strongly asserted. Since the set overall leans a little more towards emphasising a one-movement pattern (perhaps to avoid listeners getting lost), where there has been a strong implication of a two-movement understanding I have identified it as such.

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[Table 1: Discography with names of note writers and structural categories]

[Key to Table 1]

To begin a brief overview of the set, and to identify key examples to be explored in detail, see Table 1. The column of '1's mark out some examples of correlation where one-movement performances receive one-movement programme notes. The first recording of the work, by Robert Kajanus in 1932, presents a single-movement sweep of tempo as shown in Example 1, with some middleground fluctuation between bars 92 and 105 (and elsewhere) being incorporated into a larger pattern of gradually increasing tempo from this point to the end.[36] The contemporaneous sleeve note, by Cecil Gray, that accompanied the original release on 78-rpm records states clearly that 'the work is in three movements, the usual scherzo being dispensed with' and goes on to analyse the music on this basis, though it does also allow for the secondary possibility that one might view the scherzo as being 'embodied in the first movement'.[37] A much later CD rerelease of the same Kajanus performance features a sleeve note by Brendan Wehrung that refers to 'movements which take on changing functions' and 'seamless organic growth', suggesting only that the first movement 'somehow assumes the tone of a scherzo' and criticising the earlier 1915 version of the work where the two putative movements were separate.[38] So whilst both writers are willing to acknowledge the possibility of scherzo character within the movement, their characterisation of the structure comes down more firmly on the side of a single-movement continuity, an interpretation that matches that of Kajanus in sound. In the case of Gray this is largely because that was the way in which the structure of the piece was widely seen at the time (as was to be reflected in his 1935 analytical-critical monograph on Sibelius's symphonies),[39] and in the case of Wehrung more probably in a bid to match the historic performance that his note was intended to accompany.

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The second released performance, by Koussevitsky, is another clear one-movement interpretation matched by a one-movement sleeve note, dismissing the importance of the 1915 version of the symphony, but this is part of a family of related notes by Robert Layton that were written later (and will be examined separately below), and hence is marked in the 'L' column on Table 1. Tjeknavorian's performance and sleeve note is a particularly striking example of one-movement correlation that will also receive separate investigation, as Correlation 1 below. Alexander Gibson conducted on three recordings of the work and all promote a one-movement interpretation, even when this style had become unfashionable long before the third version in 1983. It is therefore noteworthy that this third recording's accompanying sleeve note by Malcolm Rayment is particularly adamant in dismissing the relevance of two-movement precedents, claiming that 'the finished version [of the symphony] is so superior that the initial [1915] one has no place in the concert hall'.[40] Gibson's first performance (1960) carries a short sleeve note that simply states 'The Symphony is in three movements, though the first of these is clearly in two sections', a 'one/hedge' interpretation that is easily compatible with its one-movement performance.[41] In contrast, Gibson's second performance (1975) has a less congruent sleeve note that moves it into a different category below. All of these notes were written later than their recording was laid down, and the authors made different decisions about how (or whether) to relate their comments to the recording, with the question arising of whether they listened to the performance and whether these subtle interpretative distinctions were enough to sway their remarks. Already then the intricate nature of relationships between sleeve note and performance is making itself evident, although such correspondences as there are suggest that they may be deliberate.

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Recordings flagged in the '2' column of Table 1 constitute examples of correlation between two-movement performance and two-movement sleeve notes. Karajan's ground-breaking 1953 performance starts slowly and instigates a pronounced tempo transition following bar 106 to a new, livelier speed and mood, through these performance choices separating out two contrasting 'movements', as can be seen in Example 2.[42] This performance goes with the first sleeve note from the set to mention the possibility of a two-movement structure, as will be discussed below as Correlation 2a. Barbirolli's 1959 performance is an 'early adopter' of this innovative two-movement performance style, and its later CD-release notes by Michael Kennedy reinforce this, saying that the first movement 'still bears traces of having been two separate entities', adding the counterbalance 'for all its thematic unity and its tonal scheme'.[43] Karajan (1965) and Panula (1969) both demonstrate a creative use of two-movement track timings that will be explored separately as Correlation 2b, whilst Ashkenazy's (1981) exaggerated two-movement performance is accompanied with the relatively definitive statement that 'a moderato movement turns itself into a scherzo'.[44] Colin Davis's similarly exaggerated two-movement performance also receives confirmation in a cassette programme note by Jack Diether saying the piece 'was originally cast in four separate movements' and even in its final form 'at the indication Allegro moderato [b. 114][...] he begins the cue-lettering from A again, as if this really were the beginning of a new (though linked) movement'.[45] Another Karajan recording of this piece, his last in 1978, sees Douglas Pudney dramatise the hedging process - saying 'Musical analysts have argued strongly about the structure of this first movement, and whether the symphony is still really in four movements' and 'Sibelius experienced trouble with the form of this symphony' - before cautiously legitimising the two-movement interpretation of the contents: 'the Allegro moderato section is reached - the so-called "scherzo"'.[46] Thus more correlations appear within the group of two-movement performances, even though certain writers fall only just to this side of the fence rather than the other.

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Most of the few performances whose movement structure could be called 'average', in that they fall between the one- and two-movement pattern, show a form of correlation by sporting a sleeve note with a 'hedging' rhetoric (see 'H' column on Table 1). Both of Ormandy's performances fall into the 'average' category, and the earlier one (1956) receives a non-committal sleeve comment that 'by means of a quickening in tempo and a contrast of mood, the second section of the movement (if one likes to consider it as such, the scherzo) gets underway'.[47] The second Ormandy performance (1979) receives stronger hedging ('some confusion') from Richard Freed and the curious locution of 'not merely':

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There has been some confusion about the number of movements in the Fifth Symphony [...] There had been four in the original version, but the sections Sibelius designated movements I and II became so joined to each other as to constitute not merely two interconnected movements but a single continuous one [...].[48]

The 1982 Rattle performance is also indeterminate in its tempo structure, and its sleeve-note writer Gerald Abraham gives an account of the work's compositional history before adding ambivalently:

As for the problem of the first movement, which naturally fascinates the critics, it is no problem for the listener. If he is simply listening, he will probably be unconscious of any join between the original first movement and the scherzo; [however] if he has a miniature score in front of him he can see that the original scherzo began at letter A on p. 32 and that pp. 28-31 probably represent the transition from the original first movement.[49]

Likewise Bernstein's performance of 1987 has ambiguous features of various tempo traditions, whilst its note-writer Bayan Northcott chooses to articulate the music's first section as functionally 'both' separate and preparatory: 'the Molto moderato function[s] both as a compressed sonata form and a double exposition to the scherzo'.[50]

Distinctively unusually-structured performances can also prompt a hedging sleeve note. For Berglund's 1986 release, Julian Haylock makes a basic hedging statement that Sibelius 'telescoped the first two movements into one to produce one of the most exhilarating utterances in the history of symphonic form' and this comment certainly reflects the exciting and complex qualities of the recording:[51] Berglund's performance, illustrated in Example 3, is a very structurally sophisticated interpretation combining a two-movement tempo transition with a recapitulation-marking gesture at bar 298 that simultaneously tends to bind the whole passage perceptually into a single sonata-form movement, a subtle way of 'hedging' the structure performatively.[52] And the strong hedge from Geoffrey Crankshaw that makes explicit how 'analysts are still at loggerheads', referring to both a sudden tempo change in the middle and 'one mighty argument' across the movement, is such a good match for Rozhdestvensky's special 'stepped' performance pattern that it receives individual consideration as Correlation 3.

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Of the others that appear to be directly at odds - that is, where a programme note leaning towards a single-movement view clashes with a recording that suggests a two-movement interpretation, or vice versa - the majority have a programme note by Robert Layton, a Sibelius writer and analyst whose distinctive perspective gets recycled from one sleeve note to another irrespective of the contents of the recording. His conviction that the one-movement interpretation is the most valid only deepens as the performance tradition moves in the other direction; hence these sleeve notes to recordings by Koussevitsky (1940), Karajan (1961), Barbirolli (1967), Berglund (1975), Saraste and Blomstedt are marked with an 'L' on Table 1 and will be considered separately in Section V. Maazel's 1966 performance produces a unique 'diagonal' pattern[53] but disappointingly carries an unrelated note that appears to be lifted from Layton's monograph which was published the year before.

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Of the rest, five note-recording pairs are neutral with respect to each other; either the note hedges (Collins, Sargent, Salonen, Andrew Davis) or the performance is indeterminate (Rattle 1988), as indicated in the 'N' column of Table 1.[54] Varieties of hedging rhetoric in this group of notes range from the clinical 'Leaving aside the debate over the correct number of movements'[55] and the shrugging 'But it matters little whichever way we regard the music'[56] through a balanced description of the piece as formally advanced[57] to the more dramatic 'stark contrast[...] yet[...] utter inevitability'.[58] Only three note-recording pairs seem potentially at odds (marked 'O'): Gibson's middle performance (from 1975), in a one-movement pattern as always, has a hedging commentary from Wadham Sutton, leaning first towards the two-movement: '[Sibelius] telescoped the first two of its four movements into one, placing what is in effect the Scherzo before the recapitulation', and then towards the one-movement: 'the form is free, but the construction is close-knit and logical'.[59] Conversely, Järvi's gently two-movement performance has what might be labelled a 'hedge/one' sleeve note: it refers to corresponding points in the first version of the symphony, and describes the constituent two sections under separate headings, but labels them '1st movement, first part' and '1st movement, second part' and pins them together with an overarching sonata scheme.[60] Similarly Bernard Jacobson's notes to the CD re-release of Colin Davis's clearly two-movement version provides a hedge/one interpretation by casting 'some doubt' on the number of movements, and pointing out that 'Sibelius himself referred to four movements', before concluding 'But commentators generally prefer to see these two sections as forming a single movement[...] their combined span is so seamless that [it] has the impact of one long, superbly controlled, and masterfully unified accelerando'.[61] Jacobson's note is unusual in having a title and in showing his name at the top of the note, like an essay, rather than less prominently at the bottom, which might suggest his (or the record company's) intention to provide a more independent piece of writing than is the norm.

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Overall then this gives six or seven examples of correlation within each of the three structural groups - nineteen altogether - with at least one strong correlation in each group, plus seven cases where the note is understandably irrelevant, five neutral cases, and three slight discrepancies. That seems to be a higher level of correlation, and a lower level of unexplained discrepancy, than one might expect to arise on average in a group of recordings - though since this kind of survey has not been previously undertaken with other works it is difficult to know. In the few special cases which showed unusually specific correlations between the note and the performance, I felt provoked to investigate further how they had come about. We'll examine these in detail as correlation case studies: the recordings by Tjeknavorian, Karajan (1953), Karajan (1965), Panula, and Rozhdestvensky.

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III. Correlation 1: One-movement integration in Tjeknavorian and Orga 

Tjeknavorian's interpretation (from 1976) carries a sleeve note by Ateş Orga, a proud author of programme notes who maintains an online index of the over 1600 works for which he has written them.[62] The first long movement of the Sibelius is described in Orga's sleeve note as 'a study in tempo structure [which] represents one long accelerando culminating in the più presto of the closing 32 bars'.[63] This is an idiosyncratic view of the composition as notated in the score, where no accelerando is marked until after bar 106, but is actually an accurate description of the performance, whose tempo structure is illustrated in Example 4. Tjeknavorian maintains a progressive (if fluctuating) increase of tempo even when this is not indicated in the score, for instance at bar 19 between the first and second subject group, and through bar 92 even though this passage is marked Largamente. And the performance does make its only major articulation at the coda - although this appears just after the Presto marking at bar 507, rather than the Più Presto at bar 555 implied in the sleeve note.

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Tjeknavorian's tempo structure presents a highly integrated view of the movement, at a time when the one-movement pattern had become unfashionable in the recorded literature in favour of an interpretation with strong tempo contrasts. But the internal integration of the first movement is only part of a larger integration of the entire symphony in his performance: Tjeknavorian performs the whole symphony attacca, with only 2 seconds between the last downbeat of each movement and the first of the next one, scarcely enough time for the sound to die away. (This feature is unique to this recording: a more typical value would be 10 seconds after the first movement and 5 seconds after the second movement.) He delivers an unusually fast second movement - the basic tempo is between 90 and 100 bpm, a noticeable difference from the composer's suggested 80 bpm and many performances that are comfortably slower - which further lessens the contrast between this movement and its surrounding first and third fast movements.

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The 'attacca' process of the recorded performance is again reflected in the sleeve note. Orga describes the middle movement as of a 'dance-like character' - in contrast to some other writers' description of it as a slow movement [64] – and adds that the work as a whole is:

divided into three movements, with no traditionally marked break between any of them. Gerald Abraham has suggested [...] that as the music stands in its final form it should really be regarded as a single, integrated structure in which only vestiges of the original scheme are left to remind us of its first concept.[65]

This 'single structure' scheme is a plausible view of the symphony, but an extremely unusual one: the movements are indeed unnumbered, but conventionalised buffers appear between them in the form of a double barline and new tempo marking and key signature,[66] enough to make most performers treat them as a small point of rest. Although Orga quotes an analytical essay by Abraham to support his view of a unified symphony, in fact Abraham was referring to just the first movement as being (possibly) a single integrated structure.[67] He has thus been wilfully, or creatively, misread by Orga to support the latter's conception of the music's larger continuity, again matching the performance he is describing.[68]

The performance and the sleeve note are each unique amongst the set of forty recordings for being so extreme in the levels of integration that they put forward, such that it seemed like more than coincidence that they were paired together. I tracked down Orga to ask him if this was the case, and he confirmed that he, Tjeknavorian, and the producer Charles Gerhard prepared the recording together, and that the correlation between the note and the performance was the result of their joint interpretation of the work, based on both musical and orthographic considerations.[69] If a performance and an analytical writing are both realisations of a personal interpretation of a piece,[70] the interpretational concept here is one that has been built up by discussion between individuals, and realised in different media in parallel, then finally recombined into a multi-media package (offering still another layer of integration). It is clear that this recording and its sleeve note are linked together closely, and we can conclude that such cases of interpretative correlation are sometimes, as here, the result of deliberate and fruitful collaboration.[71]   

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Correlation 2a: Two-movement contrast and change in Karajan (1953) and Amis

The ground-breaking two-movement interpretation by Herbert von Karajan with the Philharmonic Orchestra in 1953, already discussed in Section II above, comes along with the first programme note to mention any possibility of a two-movement interpretation of the passage. John Amis comments in his contemporaneous LP notes that 'the first movement [of the Symphony] has the elements of two movements' (even though he hedges a little by adding that 'the mood and thematic material are welded insolubly into one'). He observes that after the Allegro marking 'the music perceptibly quickens at last to a fast three in a bar', describing a change to a light and fast scherzo style that is indeed perceptible in the second half of Karajan's performance - whereas the same could not be said of any of the other prior recorded versions which remain relatively steady and solid-sounding, suggesting the continuation of a discursive first movement. Amis's qualifier 'at last' refers to an unspecified point after the start of the Allegro at bar 114 (and before 'the trumpet has a brief dancing tune' which is at bar 218), and suggests a change that is awaited or that is later than it might be - and this reflects the distinctive shape of Karajan's tempo structure, where the faster speed is established by a steep but gradual accelerando which begins just after the potential analytical movement break at bar 106 but culminates much later around bar 150: see Example 2. This interpretative decision is also in distinction to the tempo markings on the score which indicate a continuous process of speed increase through markings of 'poco a poco meno moderato' at bar 107, 'Allegro moderato (ma poco a poco stretto)' at bar 114, and '(vivace molto)', 'Presto', and 'Più presto' at bars 372, 507, and 555, rather than any settling-down point for the tempo. Karajan does continue to increase the tempo at a lesser rate following bar 150, and this is reflected in Amis's subsequent comments that 'the music constantly speeds towards a powerful close'.

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All these compatibilities suggest that Amis was describing the specific performance, rather than a random interpretative possibility, so (as in the case of Orga and Tjeknavorian) I thought it worth writing to Amis to enquire. Unfortunately, Amis had little recollection of writing the note, which at 57 years' remove was disappointing but not surprising. He stated that he didn't think he had had the chance to listen to Karajan's performance beforehand, but that he might have read Abraham's account of the symphony (the same account that Orga had used to support his own programme note's agenda in Correlation 1).[72] Unlike the case of Orga and Tjeknavorian, this shows an indirect pattern of relatedness between note and performance, where the creative artists appear to merely happen to share a compatible interpretation. At the same time the possibility of shared prior influences remains a likelihood, whether in the form of notable performances or well-circulated written accounts.

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Correlation 2b: Track timing in Karajan (1965) and Panula

The cassette release for Karajan's 1965 performance (with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra)[73] has been allocated a track listing as follows. Normally the piece is 'tracked' as having three movements on cassettes, LPs or CDs. Here though the music has been allocated indicated four (Arabic) numerals by someone, showing the controversial passage as two, connected movements, even whilst they have been unable to attach a (Roman) movement number to this second track. This decision is supported by track timings in four movements, so that listeners will be led towards this interpretation if they are following the timing in order to determine the points of division. There is no written commentary to contradict (or support) this guidance.

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Panula's performance from 1969 is also tracked in four movements (more powerfully, since this is a re-release in CD format), and numbered with arabic and Roman numerals exactly like the Karajan, with its own timings in four movements - even though the numberings here are paralleled by a prose commentary which gives a basic hedging approach.[74] Both of these performances are two-movement interpretations, the Karajan very strongly so and the Panula more moderately, so these unusual trackings and timings show another way that the creators of record sleeves can reflect the performances inside. Whoever the anonymous person at the record companies was who allocated these numbers, they wielded a surprising amount of persuasiveness in a small number of digits.

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Correlation 3: Rozhdestvensky and Crankshaw and their 'stepped' interpretation

Geoffrey Crankshaw's programme note, for Rozhdestvensky's performance in 1980, is a rich hedge that both strongly articulates the movement division and affirms the overall unity of the movement. Like Orga's (and Amis's) notes, it creatively misreads the construction of the symphony, but in a different direction:

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Analysts are still at loggerheads over the architecture of the first movement's eventful music. Does the composer offer us a single movement or two linked together? The problem does not emerge in the movement's initial stages [...]. Suddenly the tempo changes to Allegro moderato, ma poco a poco stretto. It is this turn of events which has caused some to view the episode as the start of a fresh movement - linked but yet distinct [...]. The whole procedure is typical of the composer's creative processes. No, this is not two movements tacked together, but one mighty argument, all evolving from quite simple germs.[75]

The marking of Allegro moderato at bar 114 is only an intermediate point in the gradual acceleration that continues in the score from bar 107 through to bar 555; the change at bar 114 is descriptive and notational and marks the point in the recomposition where the bridge material met the scherzo, but is inaudible in tempo terms. Yet Crankshaw's identification of a 'sudden' tempo change perfectly describes the structure of the particular performance, and seems non-coincidentally connected with it. Example 5 shows Rozhdestvensky's 'stepped' interpretation, separating distinct tempo plateaux with no acceleration within them (despite the 'stretto' indication in the score) by an abrupt increase in tempo between bars 108 and 113. There are four such stepped interpretations in the set, and it seems to be a Russian tradition;[76] the programme notes for the other three (conducted by the Russians Horenstein and Kondrashin and the latter's pupil Levi), tantalisingly, make no mention of the issue and so have had to be excluded from this collection. The performance style represents an effective structural 'hedge' of a kind, since the step in tempo separates the two constituent movements even whilst the lack of continued accelerando fails to differentiate them - and hence is matched by the programme note very neatly.

In this case I would speculate that the correlation between note and performance is a result of the writer responding to the qualities of the recording rather than a collaboration or a coincidence, since his notes date from five years after the recording itself. Crankshaw's career was as a general critic and CD reviewer (for Musical Opinion, Classic CD, the Musical Times and others), rather than having any evident personal links with Russian conductors directly. His obituary mentions his work 'as a writer of sleeve notes, each meticulously researched' and reflects that, 'for him, [the] sharing of experiences was unquestionably what the job was all about',[77] which might support the theory that he had heard and wished to communicate something of the specific recording. If this is so, it is a form of relationship between note and performance which is generally impossible in the case of live concert performances and their programme notes, since by definition the programme is required to be available before the commencement of the performance. Here then the pattern of influence from recorded performance to written sleeve note would be in a sense a straightforward line - but the relation of the note to the score and its own indications is correspondingly made a little looser.

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Since some of the correlations noted above make reference to writings other than sleeve notes, we can now pull this thread to unravel the general cultural context and reveal the nature and function of these other writings.

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IV. The middlebrow, their programme notes, and 'analytical' writing on Sibelius

The notion and phenomenon of the musical-cultural 'middlebrow' forms a link between the reception of Sibelius in Britain and the pivotal function of programme notes. The term is first found in print around 1925 but derives (with a little irony) from late Victorian and Edwardian popular phrenology; it delineates a category opposed to both ends of the 'high-low' and 'elite-mass' dichotomies and, whilst it can be pejorative, was also owned by many who described themselves and their tastes as such.[78] The middlebrow musical canon was drawn largely from European repertory (whilst influences on the popular style were mostly American), and typically saw classical symphonies rubbing up against brass band music, operatic overtures, virtuoso violin arrangements, Handel and Mendelssohn choral works, and melodic pieces by the likes of Bizet, Elgar, Albert Ketèlbey, Richard Rodgers, and Johann Strauss.[79]

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This middlebrow 'musical public' then felt itself to be distinguished not only from professional musicians on the one hand but also from 'the vulgar herd' on the other,[80] and they were open-minded in their tastes but only up to a point. Overchallenged (even bullied) by the new phenomenon of Reithian BBC radio broadcasting into the belief that contemporary music was in a sense good for them and they should come to endure it,[81] many of them found that they could not stomach the musical (and probably also the national) implications of Schoenberg and his students in particular.[82] By 1931 'even self-proclaimed new music enthusiasts had lost patience with the Corporation's preoccupation with this particular composer [Schoenberg]'.[83] This same year was a pivotal point for the reception of Sibelius's music in Britain, since it saw the appearance of both Cecil Gray's pioneering biographical and aesthetical monograph Sibelius, and the premiere recordings of the First and Second Symphonies:[84] by the end of that year, Scott Goddard could note 'the considerable increase of interest in the music of Sibelius in this country' afforded by these developments.[85] The listening public who had absorbed the spirit if not the letter of the contemporary music message leapt on this composer's works with enthusiasm: indeed, 'Sibelius's symphonies were so popular in England by the mid to late 1930s that the phenomenon was often referred to at the time as the "Sibelius cult" '.[86]

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For the middlebrow audience's needs the programme note was the perfect vehicle: informative, only moderately technical, and delivered in manageable chunks which combined perfectly with their listening practices. And of the eight 'leading English-language writers of programme notes in the early 20th century' mentioned by Nigel Simeone,[87] a noticeably high proportion of them - namely Donald Tovey, Ernest Newman and Rosa Newmarch - were strongly involved with commentating on and promoting Sibelius in the early days of his British popularity. Donald Francis Tovey wrote distinguished notes for his own concerts in Edinburgh and for some in London, some of which were anthologised as Essays in Musical Analysis; his analytical commentary on Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, which appeared (alongside that on the Third) in volume II of these Essays, achieves the status of a major explication of the piece's structure for its published time of 1935.[88] The critic Ernest Newman, always prominent in the push to promote new music to the general listener, provided part of the extensive sleeve note for the premiere recording of Sibelius's Fifth (with Karajan) in 1932, where he introduced the composer as 'one of the most remarkable minds that has ever found its outlet in music',[89] elsewhere having compared him favourably to Schoenberg.[90] And Rosa Newmarch, regular note-writer for Henry Wood's concerts at the Queen's Hall and author of the collected Concert-Goer's Library of Descriptive Notes, was one of the earliest to publish substantially on Sibelius's music; her booklet Jean Sibelius: A Finnish Composer of 1906 was less well-known but perhaps even more telling than her 1939 biography Jean Sibelius: A Short Story of a Long Friendship.[91] As part of the Granville Bantock / Henry Wood circle she was jointly responsible for welcoming Sibelius to Britain in 1905 and 1908 and creating the first wave of appreciation for his music here before his fame was to spread during the 1930s.[92]

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It is noticeable in this account that there is an odd cross-over between programme notes and published analytical volumes in the form of Tovey's Essays and Newmarch's Concert-Goer's Library, both of which are books which collate a selection of their existing programme notes into print - and this observation provides the key to dismantling an apparent distinction between the two genres that is unhelpful to understanding British musical reading material of the period. Whilst nineteenth-century Britain could be regarded as 'the land without music analysis' in comparison with the detailed activity elsewhere in Europe, it did possess active traditions of technical and pedagogical analysis.[93] However it was what Catherine Dale identifies as the third tradition of '"programme-note" style analysis' that formed the basis for the readable blend of musical commentary and dramatic hermeneutics that made Tovey's writings more widely read than others', and hence 'set the standard for technical analysis in Britain'.[94] Even when Tovey's writings were intended as self-standing publication or comments on an edition, they 'serve as an introduction to the work that the listener is about to hear, and it is this aspect that lends them the distinct character of "programme notes" '.[95] This third style of writing would have been familiar to British musical life from the analytical programme notes written by George Grove and August Manns for the Crystal Palace concerts in London,[96] which also stimulated the writing of the former's famous Dictionary and his reference text Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies.[97] The extent of the cross-over between British analysis and programme notes is evident from the tug-of-war in Grove's Dictionary where the article that began life under the title 'Analysis', in the first edition (of 1879) and the second edition, and morphed into 'Analytical Notes' (with accretions by other writers) in the third and fourth editions, was retitled 'Programme Notes' in the fifth edition;[98] the sixth edition of 1980 (New Grove) carries an article on Analysis in the modern sense (with a brief mention of Tovey in his historical position),[99] but no entry for Programme Notes, and it is not until the seventh edition of 2001 (New Grove Revised) that both topics are given full consideration in their own separate place.

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Indeed even that analytical material on Sibelius, published in Britain, which did not begin life as programme notes, tends to have the qualities of a 'listener's guide', and appears in outlets intended for high circulation, usually under the banner of a collectable series for the general listener.[100] The music critic Cecil Gray published a set of analytical comments on each of Sibelius's symphonies in the tiny and inexpensive Musical Pilgrim format (77 pp., 6''x4'), a series which Megan Prictor recognises as part of Oxford University Press's music appreciation efforts (complementing the landmark The Oxford Companion to Music (1923), The Radio Times Music Handbook (1935) and similar middlebrow ventures).[101] The 1947 Sibelius: A Symposium, edited and with a chapter on the symphonies by Gerald Abraham, guides the reader (or listener) gently through each of the genres frequented by this composer, choosing Sibelius as the first contemporary composer (and only the third composer overall) in the series Music of the Masters, a choice which he said 'calls for little defence'.[102] Although he was a publishing musicologist, typically for this group of writers Abraham's career was by no means centred on the ivory tower - he worked in an editorial capacity at the Radio Times (1935-39), and The Listener (1939-42), and as Director of the Gramophone Department at the BBC (1942-47), becoming a professor at Liverpool University only in the same year as his Sibelius book was published. The Finnish conductor and composer Simon Parmet continued in the same vein with his The Symphonies of Sibelius (published in Swedish in 1955 and in English translation in 1959); the middle-brow appeal of the text is given away by its subtitle, A Study in Musical Appreciation. Robert Layton was entrusted with the life-and-works Master Musicians volume which came out in Sibelius's centenary year of 1965;[103] as a regular reviewer for Gramophone magazine and The Stereo Record Guide, and a BBC internal rather than an academic musicologist, he too thus personifies the connections between recorded and broadcast music and the more apparently formal music monographs. The same year the BBC itself published a booklet on Sibelius and Nielsen, intended to supplement its centenary broadcasts on the Third Programme and the Music Programme, written by the composer (and freelance lecturer/writer) Robert Simpson. The 'discovery narratives' of this booklet seem to want to replicate the listening process of a putative innocent but open-minded listener ('What now - is this a new movement, a scherzo? [...] Just as we settle happily, sure that we have the answer[...]')[104], but (like many such texts from Tovey onwards) invoke a substantial amount of music notation, technical terminology, and harmonic analysis such as would challenge some of his intended audience.[105] Lionel Pike, as an academic musicologist employed by the University of London, marks the start of a new trend towards professionalism in British Sibelius studies with his Beethoven, Sibelius and 'the Profound Logic' of 1978; published by Athlone Press, the publishing house of the University of London, the book's 240-page length and over-arching analytical theories move it out of the league of the 'ordinary listener' and into the domain of a music undergraduate.[106] Nonetheless, the previous tradition was revivified when James Hepokoski's ground-breaking analytical and hermeneutic Sibelius research was published in the popular Cambridge Handbook series, intended to provide 'accessible introductions [...] with the concert-goer, performer and student in mind',[107] rather than in a prestigious but obscure scholarly monograph.[108]

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Thus part of the success of Sibelius in Britain can surely be attributed to the style and widespread distribution of the 'analytical' material, founded on the tried-and-tested style of the programme note, which made it accessible to the large middlebrow listening public. It was thus complementary to the role of the symphonic recordings themselves, which from 1931 allowed the public to to 'play the work daily and at last get close to the music'.[109] 'Few composers have benefited as much from the invention of the phonograph as has Sibelius', claimed Harold Johnson in 1959,[110] but the beneficial role of the accompanying (and related) written materials should also not be underestimated.

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V. The Sibelius analysts and their recording sleeve notes

In this context of fluidity between the analytical monograph and the performance paratext, then, it shouldn't be surprising that some of these published Sibelian authors also turn to writing sleeve notes for recordings as a means of reaching their intended audience, as well as supplementing their freelance careers.

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Gray wrote the analytical part of the extensive accompanying material for the first recording of the work under Kajanus and HMV (with Ernest Newman contributing the aesthetic-historical introduction). Both this programme note and Gray's slightly later monograph propound a one-movement scheme whilst acknowledging the possible division into two sections within it. The book states that 'the first movement definitely falls into two strongly contrasted sections in such a way that it is possible to regard them as two separate movements playing without a break [...] [but this] seems to the present writer illogical and indefensible';[111] whilst the note claims that 'the work is in three movements, the usual scherzo being dispensed with or, if one chooses to look at the matter in that way, embodied in the first movement'. The music examples and the details of the musical materials in the five-sheet note are, in places, more lavish and extensive than in the monograph, though lacking some deeper thematic correlations between the later movements that were presumably revealed by the passage of time.[112] The correlation between Kajanus's interpretation and Gray's description may well be partly explained by the latter's familiarity with the former's performing style, a tantalising link back to the composer in the light of Kajanus's devotion to rendering Sibelius's works in a way that closely paralleled that of the composers's own performances.[113]

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Abraham's formal analysis combines one- and two-movement schemes together to make a compound scheme, the first well-circulated account to give a detailed plan for a two-movement view of the piece. This source appears to be popular with writers of programme notes of all stances: not only was Abraham (mis)quoted by Orga in his unifying programme note for Tjeknavorian, but when pressed for the influences upon his ground-breaking note for Karajan's two-movement recording, John Amis also speculated that he 'might have read Abrahams'.[114] In another layer of contradictions, Abraham's published article is as technically detailed as any of its time, but when he writes his own programme note, for Rattle's 1982 recording, Abraham respects the more exoteric nature of the latter genre, pointing out that reassuringly that 'as for the problem of the first movement which naturally fascinates the critics [viz. himself and his peers!], it is no problem for the listener'.[115] Nonetheless he can't resist giving rehearsal letters for those with a miniature score who want to look up the details of the form. 

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Layton wrote sleeve notes for a range of recordings, following the release of his 1965 monograph on Sibelius, but increasingly staunchly defended the analytical point of view he had already established in its pages. The relevant passage in his monograph on the opening of the Fifth Symphony states that 'there are compelling musical reasons for disregarding [the historical movement] division and viewing the piece as one continuous movement. Not the least compelling are the organic cohesion of the material and the overall tonal scheme of the movement'.[116] Accordingly in the 1967 version of his programme note which is used for both Barbirolli (1967) and the later cassette re-release of Karajan (1961), he recommends the one-movement scheme; but at this point his position is a fairly moderate 'hedge/one' type. He begins with a typical hedging reference to the movement as 'perhaps the most original in all Sibelius', continuing by describing it as 'a united framework that [nonetheless] combines features of first movement and scherzo', but finally acknowledging that the second part of the movement 'is so closely integrated both in feeling and substance with the first part that one takes their unity for granted'. These programme notes take arms against the analytical significance of the earlier 1915 version of the symphony, with its separate opening movements, by saying that 'Sibelius was dissatisfied with this' and felt compelled to withdraw it twice 'for further re-working'.

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The same basic sleeve note by Layton receives a minor rewrite in 1974 for a recording by Berglund, but by 1988 (when it accompanies a recording by Saraste), the note has been adapted with a mix of old and new sentences, and Layton's rhetoric has intensified the argument against the 1915 version. To his previous comments he adds 'There is no doubt [Sibelius] hurried so that it would be ready for the occasion [of its first performance in 1915]', and 'In fact it was not until 1919 that the symphony was finished', emphasising 'how drastic a metamorphosis the work underwent' between revisions.[117] This version of the note also suppresses the dissenting voices (of Abraham and Parmet) present in the earlier versions which give the balancing two-movement perspective, making the new note a one-movement interpretation without any element of hedging. The same content revised for a 1990 CD re-release of Koussevitsky (1940) keeps the essence of these comments but adds that Sibelius 'undoubtedly hurried' the first version (italics added), and emphasises the final version as the 'definitive form'. (Whereas Layton waxes descriptive about the conductor's specific performances of the coupled Second and Seventh Symphonies, for the Fifth he relies on the pre-performance opinions he already has in stock.) And the further redraft for Blomstedt's 1993 performance amplifies his previous comment that 'Sibelius was not happy' with the 1915 version to speculate that 'Sibelius was not at all happy' with it (italics added). This gradual process of adding narrative emphasis seems like an increasing attempt to dismiss the significance of the earlier version of the symphony, with its structural precedent of separate movements, in the face of growing discussion of it elsewhere, so as to strengthen the one-movement interpretation that the author prefers and that he is known for. Through the sleeve note revisions we are able to watch Layton's opinions on the structural debate entrench themselves over the years, a fascinating diachronic process one is not often afforded.[118]

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How does Layton's nexus of sleeve notes relate to the performances they support and the performances he personally approves of? Layton uses the sleeve note medium to propound his one-movement interpretation despite the fact that all of the performances that his notes are attached to (except for the rereleased Koussevitsky) present a two-movement interpretation of some degree (see Table 1). The written material that travels from one record sleeve to another thus does not seem to bear much relation to what is inside; Layton has more independence, perhaps, than most programme note writers, as he has his own major monograph to draw upon. In this case the programme note forms its own trajectory of reception, is unswayed by the interpretation of the performances it is attached to, and even may be trying to work against them to promote a pre-existing analytical agenda.[119]

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In his record reviews for the popular British middlebrow magazine Gramophone, Layton extends this cultural work by criticising extreme two-movement versions of the piece which move to a much faster tempo in the middle - for instance that by Esa-Pekka Salonen - but instead commends for their 'mastery of the structure' a variety of interpretations ranging from one-movement to moderate two-movement versions (the former by Tuxen and Gibson, and the latter by Rattle and Karajan).[120] In particular Sargent's moderate performance of the work made a deep impression on Layton when he heard it in the concert hall in the early 1950s - 'he handled the celebrated transition [...] with consummate skill'[121] - and so this preference for a limited although still articulated contrast between the sections of the extended movement may have cast the dye in Layton's critical writings thereafter.

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Record reviews are a relevant part of the picture here, as like sleeve notes they mediate particular sound recordings verbally to the potential listener. Symes points out that the record review 'belong[s] to a special category of texts called "dependency texts" [...] not entirely autonomous but predicated upon the pre-existence of another "text" [here the recording] upon which it casts judgement'.[122] Compared to the sleeve note, also a dependency text (or paratext), the record review is still more of an epitext - a connected statement outside the musical text itself - than the sleeve note, since a review is not physically connected to the recording like a sleeve note but merely distantly refers to it. Nonetheless, it is significant that record reviews in Gramophone magazine were labelled 'Analytical Notes and First Reviews' until 1970, thus further blurring reviews in with programme notes and sleeve notes, which were likewise considered forms of 'analysis' for much of the century (as the New Grove articles revealed above). Record reviews were aimed at the potential consumer and classical music enthusiast, and were generally written by those 'from the main bastions of the U.K. musical establishment' such as the BBC, New Grove, or university music departments.[123] Symes identifies that many review authors 'also write sleeve notes',[124] so the cultural, functional, and stylistic relationships between these two genres have been inevitably close.

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In conclusion, there is fluidity between musicological books, sleeve notes, and record reviews, both where a note-writer draws on a pre-existing text (as Orga did with Abraham), and where the note itself is written by the author of a book or article (as with Layton, and as with Gray, though his extensive note was the precursor of his published monograph). Furthermore, programme notes and sleeve notes are hardly distinguishable in style from, indeed form the basis for, published monographs and scholarly articles on Sibelius during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century in Britain, and thus form a crucial link between performance and written discourse during this period which is often overlooked. This whole range of writings (including record reviews), along with recorded (and live) performances, forms a network of musical information which was consistently aimed towards (as well as mostly digestible for) a range of listeners whose cultural approach might be termed middlebrow, as well as for those more specialist critics, performers and others who might be in a position in turn to influence public opinion.

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VI. Discussion

As we have seen in the first half of this article, a sleeve note writer may choose to enhance, ignore, or subvert the distinctive interpretation that the performance conveys (and sometimes performers and writers may team up against the composer to creatively misread the work), so that the nature of the relationship between recordings and their programme notes within the general context of the work of music is limited only by human creativity, ideology, and obstinacy. These practices create a more complex or even contradictory representation of a piece of music than might be supposed from the tidiness of the recording package. Furthermore, sleeve note contents form a vital support to a mainstream style of analytical writing and cannot be conclusively disentangled from the self-contained books in the form of which such writings normally receive academic attention. Sleeve notes represent a conduit for ideas about music, running back-and-forth between recordings, research, and reviews, and thus can enable us to trace patterns of musical thought transmission across otherwise boundaried areas of activity. What appears to be a reductive structural question, about numbers of movements in a Sibelius symphony, has here illustrated collaborative musical practices (between conductors and commentators), rhetorical strategies (of 'hedging', ossifying, and subverting), freelance working patterns (touching on institutional affiliations, record reviewing, and publication), and generic ambiguities (between notes, guide-books, and reviews) which perhaps would otherwise not have been brought to light.

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In his account of paratexts, and their diversity and significance, Genette remarks that:

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The notes that accompany musical recordings or even simply the information provided on record jackets or CD cases [...] are a mine of paratextual information. Other researchers, I hope, will work that vein.[125]

Whilst concert programme notes have become a recognised 'vein' of musical reception history, record sleeve notes have been mined hardly at all. This neglect is perhaps surprising given sleeve notes' many fruitful leads between music performance, historical contextualisation, analytical interpretation, and social delineation. Working with sleeve notes has in common some of the subversive features of working with concert programme notes: engagement with the expectations of the general listener;[126] consideration of the locus of power in the person of the writer granted the authority to control listeners' perception; and eschewing published books and articles as a starting point in favour of what might be viewed as ephemera.[127] Sleeve notes also differ from programme notes in key aspects, since they are more likely to be preserved and re-read (recordings are kept as valuable, and the jewel cases protect them) so may have influenced listener perception for longer;[128] the performance to which a notes in some sense pertains is recoverable (unlike most live concerts) and can be itself interrogated; and the status of the note vis-à-vis the work is further complicated by considering its relationships with the specificity of the individual interpretation (as above).

Sleeve note research in itself addresses historically-specific questions of music reception: whilst concert programme notes are often described as a characteristic part of nineteenth-century listening practices,[129] recording sleeve notes might be considered to be equally evocative of those of the twentieth century, when the growing availability of the household record collection enabled listeners to relocate much of their listening to the domestic sphere.[130] As an effective tool for 'shaping listening practices',[131] sleeve notes may also turn out to be coterminous with the twentieth century, since many listeners in the early 21st century are now turning to computer (and mobile-phone) downloading and digital streaming services as ways of obtaining their music, which has the advantages of arriving swiftly and demanding negligible physical storage space,[132] but lacks the convenient verbal accompaniment that comes with records, cassettes, and CDs.[133] In a sense the guidance that sleeve notes used to offer is now superseded, since for those listeners who have online access the internet invariably offers a range of information to supplement their sound files, from the very general (such as online encyclopedia articles) to the highly detailed (including extensive information on composers or performers, academic articles available through online archives, and, ironically, uploaded programme notes from concerts).[134] Maybe there is something lost in this process, the opportunity for musicians to put together intentionally a integrated package of complementary information and convey it to a receptive listener[135] - or maybe it would be too easy to sentimentalise and idealise a process that rarely worked as holistically as it might. Instead, 21st-century modes of catering to the public's hunger for musical information could be seen as just another stage in the democratisation of musical knowledge that was previously fed by programme notes, sleeve notes, and the like.

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To face the social dimensions of music reproduction and reception is, finally, to face the mechanisms through which our individual relationship with music is constituted, together with its micro-historical process, and its connections with class, privilege, and the contributions of others. The greater portion of support for western art music comes from quarters that might still be termed middlebrow; for instance, whilst the sharp edge of connoisseur listening to classical music in the UK is represented by the state-sponsored BBC Radio Three, its commercial sibling station, Classic FM, nets a notably larger audience with its easier-to-digest playlist, popularity charts, and reassuring commentaries which firmly perpetuate the middlebrow listening tradition.[136] Reflections on mechanisms of music dissemination such as these prompt self-examination and more overt discussion, particularly amongst those of us who are now music connoisseurs and professionals, about how we ourselves came to learn and appreciate what we know. (When did you first hear a particular landmark piece? where did you get the first classical recording you ever were obsessed by? how did you first find out about the composer(s) you went on to write a dissertation about?) In some of our cases, a family background provided a 'highbrow' listening environment, and/or we received a formal school education that drilled us through old-fashioned biographical and repertoire studies; but in other cases, such as my own, haphazard influences such as childhood dance classes and George Martin's orchestral scorings introduced us to a proto-classical style, and our solitary acquaintance was consolidated by poring over cassettes (and their sleeve notes) from the local library, and tape-recording interesting pieces (and their introductions) from the radio. For those who choose them, sleeve notes, and similar interventions such as radio introductions, enable a form of musical social mobility into a rich variety of genres, world styles, and historical periods. Like other institutions such as public listening libraries, sleeve notes can be seen as a form of generosity of provision that many are grateful for and recognise as contingent upon fragile social circumstances. It is perhaps paradoxical that Britain, a country notoriously rigid in class identification, should be a bastion of paratextual mechanisms designed to share forms of cultural participation with individuals who might otherwise grow up without them; or perhaps this part of the 'music appreciation movement' shares its misguided aims of internal cultural colonisation through its chosen artistic ideals.[137] In any case, sleeve notes have the potential to get us talking about particular issues of social class and educational privilege that have remained taboo, or invisible, for perhaps too long.

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