In music, a sketch is an informal document prepared by a composer to assist in the process of composition.
Sketches may range greatly in scope and detail, from the smallest snippets to full drafts; concerning Ludwig van Beethoven's sketchbooks, for instance, Dean writes that they "include every imaginable state between unaccompanied melodic motifs of a few notes to thoroughly worked-out full scores; even his fair copies of essentially 'finished' works show the signs of continuing composition."[1]
Whether a composer's sketches survive past their lifetime depends on the composer's own practice and partly on posterity. Some composers habitually discarded their sketches when a composition was completed (for instance, Johannes Brahms), while others kept their sketches; sometimes in great numbers, as in the case of Beethoven. Mozart kept a great many sketches, but some were given away to friends as keepsakes following his death, and lost.
One reason for sketches is the fallibility of human memory. But there are more sophisticated reasons to sketch: most of classical music arranges the themes of each movement into a substantial architecture, for instance involving sonata form. The eighteenth century theorists H. C. Koch and J. G. Sulzer, in their written advice to composers, suggested that they should prepare sketches that would lay out how the various themes of the work would be arranged to create the overall structure. Marston adds that Koch and Sulzer's recommendations "do in fact accord well with what scholars, borrowing from the terminology developed in relation to Beethoven's sketches, call a 'continuity draft', a notational form in which [for example] 'Beethoven can be seen fitting together the more fragmentary ideas made earlier into a coherent whole' (Cooper, 1990, p. 105)."[2]
Since the mid-19th century, the study of composers' sketches has been a branch of musicology. Nicholas Marston, writing in the New Grove, lists three reasons why the study of sketches can be of interest.
A fourth possibility is also mentioned by Marston, namely that one might appeal to the sketches to support a particular formal analysis (i.e. in music theory) of a finished work. This practice is controversial.
Surviving sketches by Johann Sebastian Bach include:
The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach contains, among several comparable early versions of compositions that became better known in their later versions, a sketch of what evolved into the first prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
See also: Mozart's compositional method. The body of sketches by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is very substantial. The watermark studies of Alan Tyson yielded among other results the conclusion that Mozart would sometimes leave a work only partially complete (in sketch form) for a number of years, then finish it when an opportunity for performance arose.[6] This in turn has been taken to support the view that Mozart carefully retained his sketches simply as a good business practice, keeping open the possibility of future performances and publication for works not immediately promising in this respect.[7]
The corpus of Beethoven's surviving sketches is substantial and frequently illustrates Beethoven's method of work, which was often slow and arduous. Commentary on Beethoven's finished works sometimes point to the extremely primitive or unpromising character of the themes as they first appear. For instance, Antony Hopkins pointed out the following sketch material for the Second Symphony, remarking that it "bears more resemblance to a bugle-call than a symphony."
He added, "One wonders why he bothered to commit such banalities to paper at all but it seems to have been an essential part of his creative procedure."[8] Hopkins's discussion (pp. 38–39) covers two further sketches, shown below:
These can be seen to be gradually evolving toward the actual main theme of the first movement as it appears in the symphony:
Sketches by Franz Schubert include the abandoned third movement of his Unfinished Symphony, and the fragment known as Piano Sonata in E minor, D 769A.
Among Schubert's symphonies there are several sketches for a symphony in D major. In the first edition of the Deutsch catalogue, these were grouped under, apart from the early . Apart from the completed Third Symphony, D 200, there appear to be at least four independent sets of sketches for a symphonic work in that key:
Also the four movements of his Seventh Symphony, D 729, in E major (1821), only survive as sketches.
Schubert's unfinished piano music ranges from rejected sketches of a few bars (e.g.) to fairly elaborate drafts with several complete movements (e.g. Reliquie sonata). The sonata exists in two stages of development: the unfinished draft version in D-flat major, and the four-movement E-flat major version which Schubert prepared for publication near the end of his life.
Also in other genres Schubert produced sketches and drafts, some abandoned, and some later developed into complete compositions:
