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The French literary criticism movement, critique génétique, is an attractive interdisciplinary model for the study of music sketches because of its staggering amount of varied scholarship published during its forty-year history, its concerted activity within the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM), and its dedicated academic journal, Genesis. However, this presentation purports that the essential value of critique génétique to sketch studies is its rigorous theoretical foundation regarding the analysis of the creative process put forth by its pioneering scholars. This presentation builds on the efforts of scholars within English and French-language musicology, as well as practitioners of critique génétique within the field of literary criticism, to establish a musical critique génétique and identifies the benefits and potential challenges of such an endeavor.

Since 2003, Anglo-American musicologists have made interdisciplinary overtures to the movement of critique génétique (Kinderman, 2003, p. xii). Sketch study scholars such as William Kinderman and Philip Gossett have seen the potential of a musicological “genetic criticism” and have advocated for an integration of its theoretical framework in the field of sketch studies (Kinderman, 2009a, 2009b, 2012; Gossett, 2009). While studies of musical sketches in French-language scholarship were undertaken within the fourth volume of Genesis as early as 1994, Nicolas Donin found that the musicological discipline in 2010 still exhibited a “profound theoretical thoughtlessness” in its understanding and analysis of the creative process (2010, p. 15). He writes, “musicology has seemed to fail, alone, to constitute composition as an object of study as a whole” (Donin, 2010, p. 15). Like his Anglo-American colleagues, Donin advocates for an intersection with other fields in the humanities and finds that applying the foundational ideas of critique génétique (such as the concept of avant-texte) is a necessity that has yet to be fully undertaken. Not surprising, the most rigorous attempt to apply principles of critique génétique to music has come from a scholar within literary criticism. In his 2009 article, “Can Genetic Criticism be Applied to the Performing Arts?,” Jean-Louis Lebrave examines his titular question by comparing the ontological status of the aesthetic objects and agents present in the performing arts with that of the literary arts, including the concepts of work, text, and performance. Lebrave’s account leaves more questions than answers. While he seems adamant that critique génétique can be applied to performing arts such as music, he does not ontologically equate literary textual variants (drafts) with their musical counterparts (sketches). He sees the musical score (and sketch) as a set of performance instructions which, unlike a literary text, is not the ultimate result of the creative process. The ultimate result would be the performance of the score, which is, for Lebrave, problematically “ephemeral” (Lebrave, 2009, p. 79).

This presentation has three specific aims. First, critique génétique is presented as a solution to a fundamental crisis in sketch studies that was initiated by Douglas Johnson’s 1978 article, “Beethoven Scholars and Beethoven’s Sketches.” In addition to spurring a barrage of polemics, Johnson’s article raised the following question: How can the sketches of a musical work, which are the textual traces of a diachronic process, be relevant in the pursuit of an understanding of the musical work as a closed, synchronic system represented by a single, definitive score? Rather than dismissing Johnson’s argument as an antiquated remnant of an outdated musicological paradigm, his question is examined on its own grounds. It is shown that Johnson was explicitly following Carl Dahlhaus’s approach to analysis in the latter’s 1975 article, “Some Models of Unity in Musical Form,” which appealed to the literary movement of New Criticism. Johnson understood the musical work as represented by a single score – a closed system that needs to be studied synchronically in order to discover internal relationships within the work. From this point of view, historical and biographical dimensions of the work and its composer are considered external to the text and thus dismissed. As such, sketches – which often represent an array of textual variants – are deemed irrelevant: they are simply historical artifacts. Any material they contain that is present in the definitive score is seen as redundant and unnecessary. Sketch material that is not found in the definitive score is dismissed as irrelevant as it is external to the text. The result of Johnson’s article was that while sketch study that remained within the realm of biography and history was not questioned (such as ascertaining the chronology and date of works, understanding the composer’s style, and discerning the composer’s intentions), the relevance of sketches toward an analysis of a work, previously left as self-evident, was open to questioning inside and outside the field.

Second, this presentation identifies specific foundational principles of critique génétique that offer a response to Johnson’s argument. Critique génétique, at its inception in the late 1960s and early 1970s, separated itself from the traditional study of manuscripts within a philology based on Lachmannian editorial principles. The writings of Louis Hay and Jean Bellemin-Noël established an approach to textual variants that took the post-structuralist view of text as the site for meaning production, but adopted a plural and mobile concept of the textual site which freely crossed the divide between text and avant-texte (see Hay, 1979; and Bellemin-Noël, 1972). Rather than appealing to a singular notion of a work’s text, critique génétique’s foundational principle is textual plurality and the rejection of an analysis of textual variants that appeals to teleology, finalism, and authorial intention. It is put forth that sketch studies can benefit from adopting such principles not only because they appeal to a nuanced and scrupulous view of the creative process, but because they render Johnson’s argument moot.

Third, this presentation concludes by examining potential challenges to the application of critique génétique to music. How does the discrepancy between the ontology of the musical work/score relationship and literary work/text relationship pose challenges to the application of fundamental principles of critique génétique to music? Most importantly, do these differences result in such challenges that the advantages of doing so are less than the benefits? Lebrave’s ontological examination of literature and music is advanced, but the presentation re-focuses the issue within dominant ontological accounts found within music aesthetics and music philosophy given by Roman Ingarden, Nelson Goodman, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez.