Derrick
Puffett, who died in 1996 at the age of 49, was a musicologist of
great originality and integrity who was for over a decade a pivotal
member of the British music analytical community. He firmly believed
that an analysis should be a disciplined piece of work concerned
with the way in which the music is constructed (‘how the notes
work’) rather than with the analyst’s fantasies about it. Although
himself well-grounded in Schenkerian and other analytical methods,
he was eclectic in the means he brought to bear in his own analysis,
ever conscious of the dangers of overzealous attempts to apply
systems, and insistent that a work must be approached from whatever
directions its content suggested. In 1982, in The Song Cycles of
Othmar Schoeck (Berne: Haupt, 1982), he wrote, ‘one should be free
to borrow any procedure that may be useful, without having to commit
oneself to a party line’, and in 1986 he observed that there was a
very narrow line between ‘finding’ a ‘concept’; and ‘cooking an
analysis’; (in ‘The Fugue from Tippett’s Second String Quartet’,
Music Analysis 5/2‒3). And in 1984:
‘analytical judgements, however rigorously they may be argued, are
likely to come out wrong if they are not supported by wide
knowledge. Every analyst must be a historian as well’ (King’s
College London Music Analysis Conference, 1984).
In his own analysis context was balanced with scrutiny, and there
were always unexpected insights and new perspectives. His
analytical judgements were sound because they were indeed
supported by a wide knowledge and because they grew out of his
love of the music itself. His writing was marked by humour, subtle
evidence throughout of a man who viewed the world and his
reactions to it unselfconsciously and with a sense of proportion;
his work speaks with a voice that was very much his own. Convinced
of the importance of a thorough working knowledge of the formal
methods of analysis, he sounded a strong voice in opposition to
the verbal excesses and the self-indulgence of the New Musicology
while maintaining a sincere regard for those aspects of it that he
felt had something solid to add to the knowledge of music and what
makes it work.
Latterly his interest was focused especially on symmetries in the
works of Wagner, Strauss, Mahler and Bruckner ‒
the augmented triad, the French sixth and tritonal
relationships, and the significance of such constructs in the
music of these composers ‒
and on the meanings attached to pitch-specific references. At
the time of his death he was working on books on Berg, Elgar
(this began as a book on Falstaff, but was becoming something
much more all-encompassing), Mahler (the Fourth Symphony and the
Scherzo of the Sixth) and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, and
articles on Bruckner (the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony), Busoni,
Britten (Death in Venice), Ravel (Chansons madécasses), Tales of
Hoffmann and the Kyrie from the B minor Mass. In the ‘bottom
drawer’ were works on the Russians Rachmaninov and Stravinsky
and on the English composers Holloway and Knussen. Surely the
greatest loss was a major book on Wagner’s last seven operas
(Fullness of Harmony: Wagner Seen from the End of the Twentieth
Century) which had occupied him for many years.