Handschin, Jacques (EN)

Handschin Jacques Samuel, *5 April 1886 Moscow, †25 November 1955 Basel, Swiss musicologist and organist. He attended secondary school in Moscow and then a commercial school in Neuchâtel (Switzerland). In 1905, he studied history and mathematics at the University of Basel, and in 1905–06 in Munich and in 1906–07 in Leipzig – history, mathematics, philology and political economy. He did not undertake regular university studies in musicology, attending only the lectures of H. Riemann in Leipzig and E. Hornbostel in Berlin. In 1905–06 he studied organ and music theory with M. Reger (in Munich and subsequently in Leipzig), and in 1906–07 he was a pupil of K. Staube, the cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. In 1907 he returned to Moscow, from where he undertook concert tours to places such as Paris, where he honed his performance skills under Ch.-M. Widor. From 1909 to 1920 he was an organ teacher (and from 1916 a professor) at the Conservatoire of the Imperial Musical Society in St Petersburg; in the summer of 1912 he was organist at the cathedral in Bern, and from 1914 organist at the Lutheran-Calvinist Petrikirche in St Petersburg. At the same time, he developed his concert career, promoting the music of J. S. Bach in Russia; he took part in a concert series initiated by A. Siloti, which was intended to cover all of Bach’s organ and harpsichord works. Handschin’s work influenced the organ compositions of Russian composers (Glazunov, Lapunov, Taneyev and others). During his time in Russia, Handschin became involved in musicological work; he published articles in the “Petersburger Zeitung” focusing mainly on the organ, and undertook studies into the history of medieval music. In 1920, he founded an acoustics laboratory together with W. Kowalenko, but soon left for Switzerland. In 1921, he obtained a doctorate at the University of Basel under K. Nef on the basis of his thesis Choralbearbeitungen und Kompositionen mit rhythmischem Text in der mehrstimmigen Musik des 13. Jahrhunderts; there, in 1924, he qualified as a professor by presenting his thesis Über die mehrstimmige Musik der St. Martial-Epoche…. From 1924, taught at the University of Basel: as a lecturer from 1924 to 1930, as an associate professor from 1930 to 1935, and as a full professor of musicology from 1935 to 1955. There he compiled an archival collection comprising some 70,000 microfilms of medieval manuscripts. Alongside his academic work, he served as an organist: from 1921 to 1924 at the Linsebühlkirche in St. Gallen, from 1924 to 1935 at the Peterskirche in Zurich, and from 1935 to 1955 at the Martinskirche in Basel. For many years, he served on the board of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft and the Schweizerische Musikforschende Gesellschaft.

Handschin’s academic interests were very broad, encompassing many fields of historical and systematic musicology. His works deal, on the one hand, with the history of music in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the late Baroque period, and the 19th and 20th centuries; and, on the other hand, with the psychology and theory of music, as well as ethnomusicology. However, his highly insightful studies on the history of medieval music—particularly the earliest organum (Zur Geschichte der Lehre vom Organum, Die Musikanschauung des Johannes Scotus, Der Organum-Traktat von Montpellier, The Two Winchester Tropers and others), the polyphony of the St-Martial school in Limoges and Notre Dame in Paris (including his habilitation thesis), and English polyphony from its beginnings up to the 13th century (A Monument of English Mediaeval Polyphony, The Two Winchester Tropers, The Summer Canon and Its Background and others). These works – like the dissertations by F. Ludwig and J. Wolf – critical and stylistic interpretations of the compositions, demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the sources of musical practice and their palaeographic aspects, enabling a comparative analysis of different versions of the works, and furthermore present a comparison of information obtained from the study of the music itself with that contained in the theoretical writings of the period. Some of Handschin’s articles place the phenomena of medieval Western music in a broader perspective – in connection with phenomena in non-European musical art – which can be seen as a realisation of Handschin’s idea of integrating the findings of historical and systematic musicology. Thus, for example, his interpretation of the origins of tropes and sequences reveals the relationships and interdependencies between Gregorian chant and Byzantine religious music (cf. Sur quelques tropaires grecs traduits en latin, Trope, Sequence and Conductus). Phenomena of English polyphony, on the other hand, are related to phenomena of French polyphony, which has made it possible, among other things, to establish the stylistic characteristics of the English (peripheral) and French organum and motet (cf. Eine wenig beachtete Stilrichtung innerhalb der mittelalterlichen Mehrstimmigkeit, On the Question of Melodic Paraphrasing in the Middle Ages), as well as to distinguish compositions of English provenance from the repertoire of French sources or to determine the historical significance of landmarks of English polyphony (cf. e.g. The Summer Canon and Its Background). Formulating his views often in the form of discussions with the views of other scholars, occasionally book reviews, and even articles, Handschin proposes a series of precise definitions of basic concepts, which are still widely accepted today. He introduces, for example, the modern understanding of the terms ‘organum’ and ‘discantus’ (cf. e.g. Was brachte die Notre Dame-Schule Neues, Zur Geschichte der Lehre vom Organum), defines the concept of paraphrasing in organum and motet compositions and in polyphonic arrangements of the ordinarium missae from the 12th to the 14th centuries (Zur Frage der melodischen Paraphrasierung im Mittelalter), as well as the concepts of conductus, lauda, trope, sequence and estampie (Über Estampie und Sequenz, The Two Winchester Tropers, Über die Laude, Trope, Sequence and Conductus). A comparative examination of genres or phenomena in musical practice made it possible, for example, to identify similarities and differences between the forms of the sequence, estampie and lai, the structures of the lauda and the virelai, cantiga and ballad, the relationship between the lauda and the conductus, and the evolutionary relationship between the trope procedure and the practice of early organum. A significant theme in Handschin’s works on medieval polyphony and monody is his examination of compositional rhythm – his accurate interpretations of the rhythmic patterns of organum parts from the 12th century and the first half of the 13th century, as well as of polyphonic conductus (cf. e.g. Was brachte die Notre Dame-Schule Neues, Zur Notre Dame-Rhythmik, Zur Frage der Conductus-Rhythmik) which is not clearly defined in the original notation, as well as interpretations of the rhythmic flow of troubadour and trouvère songs and laude (cf. e.g. Die Modaltheorie und C. Appels Ausgabe der Gesänge von Bernart de Ventadorn, Über die Laude).

Two books hold a special place within Handschin’s rich scholarly legacy: Musikgeschichte im Überblick and Der Toncharakter. The former serves as a summary of Handschin’s historical reflections, whilst the latter represents a kind of synthesis of his achievements in the field of systematic musicology. In Musikgeschichte im Überblick, Handschin sought to present individual eras as equally important and to avoid glaring disparities in the degree of generalisation when addressing the history of early and modern music; he organised the results of his own detailed research and revised a number of commonplace and widely accepted views, mechanically repeated in synthetic studies. In Der Toncharakter, however, he combined the historical and systematic aspects; for, contrary to the subtitle Eine Einführung in die Tonpsychologie, he did not confine himself to issues of the psychology of sound, but presented the main problems of music theory and history. His primary aim was to present the ‘character of sound’—understood as a specifically musical quality determined by structure, and more precisely defined by the tonal-harmonic system—from the perspective of the order of the world of sounds; furthermore, he sought to reveal the structural-logical order of the world of sounds, which, according to Handschin, – as an objective (given in nature and ideal) order based on a rational numerical foundation, and the ways in which this order was realised in particular historical eras and cultures. By attributing a universal character and the status of a timeless entity to the order of the world of sound, he simultaneously opposed the absolutisation of transient historical styles. He considered the numerical ratios 1:2, 2:3, 4:5:6 as the natural foundation of the world of sounds; consequently, he saw the consonance of the fifth as the most perfect element of the tonal system, and in the Pythagorean series of fifths – the fullest realisation of that order at the level of the tonal system; for this reason, he placed Pythagoras’s system at the centre of his deliberations.

Literature: Gedenkschrift Jacques Handschin. Aufsätze und Bibliographie, ed. H. Oesch, Bern 1957 (contains a chronological list of Handschin’s works); In memoriam Jacques Handschin, ed. H. Anglès et al., Strasbourg 1962 (includes a thematic list of Handschin’s works); W. Wiora, Der tonale Logos, “Die Musikforschung” VI 1953; To the Memory of Jacques Handschin, “Musica Disciplina” X 1956; F. Muller, The Central Ideas of Jacques Handschin, “Journal of the American Musicological Society” IX 1956; L. Schrade, Professoren der Universität Basel aus 5 Jahrhunderten, ed. M. Staehelin, Badel 1960; A. Czekanowska, Nowe perspektywy muzykologii współczesnej, “Muzyka” 1962, No. 4.