=== === ============= ==== === === == == == == == ==== == == = == ==== === == == == == == == == = == == == == == == == == == ==== M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E A Publication of the Society for Music Theory Copyright (c) 1995 Society for Music Theory +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Volume 1, Number 5 September, 1995 ISSN: 1067-3040 | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ General Editor Lee Rothfarb Co-Editors Dave Headlam Justin London Ann McNamee Reviews Editor Brian Alegant Manager Robert Judd Consulting Editors Bo Alphonce Thomas Mathiesen Jonathan Bernard Benito Rivera John Clough John Rothgeb Nicholas Cook Arvid Vollsnes Allen Forte Robert Wason Marianne Kielian-Gilbert Gary Wittlich Stephen Hinton Editorial Assistants Ralph Steffen All queries to: mto-editor@smt.ucsb.edu or to mto-manager@smt.ucsb.edu +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 1. Target Articles AUTHOR: Covach, John R. TITLE: Schoenberg's Turn to an "Other" World KEYWORDS: aesthetics, atonality, Goethe, Heidegger, musical worlding, mysticism, Schoenberg, Schopenhauer, Steiner, Swedenborg John R. Covach Department of Music Hill Hall, CB# 3320 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3320 jcovach@email.unc.edu ABSTRACT: The present paper constitutes an extension of an earlier article in this journal.(1) Building on the notion of musical worlding introduced in that essay, I explore Schoenberg's turn to atonality in the period of 1908 and after. I argue that Schoenberg employs atonality as a means of disrupting tonality in order to create an "other" world; this otherness is created by opening up a tension between the world of the "great German tonal masterworks" and the particular atonal piece. Schoenberg's fascination with other worlds is explored, and atonality is cast as a technical solution to an aesthetic problem that runs throughout Schoenberg's music and thought: how to represent the spiritual essence of music. ================================================ 1. John R. Covach, "Destructuring Cartesian Dualism in Musical Analysis" *Music Theory Online* 0.11 (1994), reference: mto.94.0.11.covach.art. See also my "Musical Worlds and the Metaphysics of Analysis," *Music Theory Online* 1.1 (1995). An earlier version of the present study was presented as part of a poster session at the 1994 Lancaster Music Analysis Conference. I would like to thank Allen Forte and Robert Wason for reading an earlier version of this study and offering valuable suggestions. Please note that while all German umlauts have been represented below with the addition of an "e," French diacritical marks, unfortunately, do not appear owing to restrictions of character use in the current online format. ================================================ INTRODUCTION Ich fuehle luft von anderem planeten Stefan George, "Entrueckung" Schoenberg is endeavoring to make complete use of his freedom and has already discovered gold mines of new beauty in his search for spiritual harmony. His music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone--and from this point of view begins the music of the future. Wassily Kandinsky (1911) [1] In the third and fourth movements of his Second String Quartet of 1907-8, Arnold Schoenberg sets texts by Stefan George, adding a soprano to the traditional four string instruments. As is well known, Schoenberg does not provide a key signature for the last movement, and many writers have taken this as an indication of the composer's turn to atonality. Recalling this period much later in his life (1949), however, Schoenberg points out that throughout all the movements of Op. 10 "the key is presented distinctly at all the main dividing-points of the formal organization."(2) Still, the combination of Schoenberg's (subsequent) turn to atonality and the George text referring to the "air of other planets" has been too much for many writers to resist. ================================================ 2. Arnold Schoenberg, "My Evolution," in *Style and Idea*, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 86. ================================================ [2] Viewing his turn to atonality in the period around 1908-9 some years after the event, Schoenberg tended to emphasize the ways in which his atonal music extended the great German musical tradition. With an almost Hegelian faith in the inevitable forward progress of history, Schoenberg tended to view his rejection of tonality as a natural development of the tonal language itself, playing down the idea that atonality constituted a radical turning point in the history of Western art music. By contrast, Carl Dahlhaus has challenged the notion that atonality forms a necessary continuation of tonal music and questions whether Schoenberg's turn to atonality was really as historically inevitable as Schoenberg later tended to portray it.(3) ================================================ 3. Carl Dahlhaus, "Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology,'" in *Schoenberg and the New Music*, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 81-93. ================================================ [3] This article explores Schoenberg's turn to atonality by employing an interpretive perspective adapted from philosophical hermeneutics. Working from Martin Heidegger's notion of fundamental ontology,(4) I propose that one way pieces of music are meaningful is in a particular work's relation to other works within some group of works. For example, pieces of tonal music in the German tradition--the canonical works of eighteenth and nineteenth century in which Schoenberg was so interested--form a kind of "community" of works. When one considers a single piece, one considers it within the context of this community of other related works. Even if one considers only the characteristic features of a single work, the exceptional features of the specific work will have to arise by a comparison with other pieces that are somehow related to it, even if this occurs only implicitly. Thus, it is almost impossible to consider any piece of tonal music in isolation from other works, and every analysis or experience of some work invokes the other works in the canon. In this way, the listener or analyst "situates" a work within the context created by its tradition, and meaning is thought of as arising not only within the work itself, but also from its relation to other works. ================================================ 4. Heidegger's fundamental ontology is presented especially in his *Being and Time* [1927], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). ================================================ [4] I will argue that Schoenberg's turn to atonality was essentially an attempt to write music that could not be situated in traditional ways within the tonal world of the "great masterworks." If the canon of eighteenth and nineteenth-century tonal works can be thought of as a kind of "musical world" in which the individual pieces that make it up are variously situated, rejecting tonality had the effect of casting these atonal pieces into a novel relationship with the musical world of the masterworks--one in which the traditional inter-opus relations are no longer valid but in which these connections still form the basis for musical understanding and meaning in a radically transformed way; meaning is created by an inability to situate a work in the expected and traditional manner. Each atonal work thus resides outside of the musical world of the canonical tonal works--in a kind of "other" musical world--while simultaneously relying on that tonal world for its effect. [5] Thought of in this manner, the interpretive question with regard to Schoenberg's turn to atonality changes significantly. Rather than exploring how atonality constitutes an extension of turn-of-the-century tonal practice (or even how it constitutes an anticipation of the twelve-tone method), one might instead explore why Schoenberg may have felt compelled to seek an "other" world. I will argue that atonality is meaningful precisely because of its difference from tonality--a difference that creates an aesthetically crucial disruption of tonal practice. A consideration of the many texts Schoenberg used in his works during this period, as well as the literary and philosophical texts that seem to have exerted some influence on his thinking about music, reveals a strong fascination with "other" worlds of various types. Atonality is thus posited as a technical solution to broader aesthetic and philosophical problems that occupied Schoenberg during this period, and indeed, throughout his career. [6] In pursuing these issues, this study will first briefly review an application of Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology to musical experience, focussing especially on the notion of "musical worlding." I will then consider and summarize Schoenberg's fascination with the mystical notion that music can provide a glimpse of an "other," higher realm of existence. These ideas can be traced in part to Arthur Schopenhauer's "metaphysics of music," but also in part to Honore de Balzac's philosophical novels (which were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg's theology). Schoenberg's awareness of Goethean science was almost certainly influenced in at least an indirect way by Rudolf Steiner's writing. I will then review well-known accounts of Schoenberg's turn to atonality (Schoenberg, Adorno, Dahlhaus, Forte). I will argue that recovering the aesthetic impact of Schoenberg's atonal music requires one to situate each particular piece with regard to the musical world of the German tonal tradition, but to situate it outside of that tradition. MUSICAL WORLDING(5) [7] In his important book, *Being and Time* of 1927, Martin Heidegger argues that the Western philosophical tradition since the time of Plato has operated under a number of assumptions that have become tacit, but that none the less determine the ways in which we think about crucial philosophical questions. One assumption that Heidegger examines is what is often termed the "Cartesian subject- object split." This means that in our daily lives we tend to divide our experience into an inside (our thinking selves as subjects) and an outside (objects in an external world). Transferred into the musical realm, the subject-object split refers to the separation that occurs--however tacitly--whenever we approach a piece of music as an object in some world "out there," an object distinct from ourselves as perceiving and/or conceiving subjects. It is probably safe to say that in our analysis of works we tend to assume this subject-object distinction; while we are mostly not at all clear on what the specific nature of the musical object is, we nevertheless proceed as if that problem can be "bracketed" in analytical discussion. ================================================ 5. This section summarizes longer and more detailed discussions of musical worlding that appeared in my "Musical Worlding: Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology and the Understanding of Music," *Methods: A Journal for Human Science* (1994): 49-58; and "Destructuring Cartesian Dualism in Musical Analysis." The reader is referred to those articles for a fuller treatment of the issues raised in this section. ================================================ [8] Following Heidegger's model of "fundamental ontology," and thus in an attempt to "de-structure" our assumptions about how meaning arises in the musical experience, I have argued that particular pieces of music are situated within what I term "musical worlds." The musical world of a piece is a number of other works that form a kind of background--a body of other pieces that create a purely musical context for some particular piece. The musical world of a piece is the product of our cumulative experience in music, and is usually not something of which we are consciously aware as we listen. The exact pieces that make up a musical world could never be exhaustively listed; in a certain sense they are what is closest to us in our musical experience, but by virtue of this they are also what is most difficult to articulate in a conscious manner: musical worlds are transparent. [9] *At the most fundamental level, we do not experience a piece of music as a self-contained object*. It is rather more like a location within a rich network of other pieces in our musical experience. *Musical understanding* arises when we are able to situate a particular piece within such a musical world, and *musical meaning* arises as we appreciate the particular way in which the work is situated. Thought of in this way, the work is not so much an isolated point as much as it is a location of gathering together. We may explain this gathering together in terms of tonality, form, row structure, motivic development, etc., but such descriptions will always be derivative objectifications of a more basic kind of musical experience. Thus in every analysis of any particular work one may pose the questions: how does this analytical interpretation situate this work with regard to some musical world? and how can that world be characterized? [10] A brief example will serve to clarify the relationship between a work and the musical world in which it may be situated. Let us take a familiar work as an example, the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 2/1 piano sonata. Following Schenkerian theory and a Heideggerian destructuring of it, one might first take the movement as a five-line piece, and then question what exactly the nature of this property of "five-lineness" is; how can it be characterized?(6) Analysts typically write about the five-line-- and the *Ursatz* and transformations that are part of the multi- layered structure of the voice leading--as if it were a property that is inherent in the piece itself. This implies that, taken in isolation from other works, the first movement of Op. 2/1 manifests the property of "five-lineness," and that this property might exist, perhaps as a kind of Platonic musical Idea, prior to any particular manifestation of it. ================================================ 6. Graphs of portions of this piece can be found in Allen Forte and Steven E. Gilbert, *Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis* (New York: Norton, 1982), 152, 238; and Charles Burkhart, "Schenker's 'Motivic Parallelisms,'" *Journal of Music Theory* 22/2 (1978): 145-175. See also Schenker's pre-*Ursatz* analysis of the work in *Der Tonwille* 2 (1922): 25-48. ================================================ [11] I hasten to point out that I am reading these analytical and theoretical claims as tacit ones; they are brought to our attention as the result of destructuring our assumptions about analytical interpretation. An interpretation in terms of musical worlds, however, would hold that "five-lineness" is a relationship that exists not only within the work, but also and most importantly *between* works; without other works that resemble this movement from Op. 2/1, there could be no five-line. The principal claim is that the five-line is a way of situating a work within a musical world of other works like it; and as such it constitutes not so much a description of a property inherent in the work itself (taken as an isolated musical object), as much as an interpretation that places the work in the richest possible context within some repertory.(7) ================================================ 7. This is, of course, a very brief and general treatment of this issue. I have offered a more extended destructuring of the tacit claims in music-analytical practice in my *Musical Communities, Communities of Music: A Hermeneutic Approach to Musical Meaning*, a paper presented at the special conference "Bordercrossings: Future Directions in the Study of Music," Ottawa, Canada (March 1995). The issues touched on in this section, however, warrant much fuller consideration and I will return to this topic in a future article and deal much more thoroughly with the many questions that my discussion raises. ================================================ [12] The sustained appeal of Schenkerian theory and analysis is the result, in large part, of its power to effectively situate individual tonal works from the eighteenth and nineteenth century with regard to the musical world of the "great German masterwork." But Schoenberg's atonal works cannot be situated with regard to that musical world in quite the same way. Even the advanced chromaticism of Schoenberg's tonal music, though it pushes at the boundaries of the musical world of German masterwork, can still be situated within that tradition. In Schoenberg's atonal music, however, it is the very way in which these works evoke the musical world of the tonal masterwork while remaining outside of it that is the crucial factor in suggesting a kind of musical "otherworldliness" in Schoenberg's atonal music. SCHOENBERG'S FASCINATION WITH "OTHER" WORLDS(8) [13] Before moving on to a discussion of atonality, it may be helpful to explore briefly Schoenberg's fascination with the idea that music can somehow penetrate into an other and higher spiritual realm--a fascination that is reflected in both those writers whom he found most interesting, and in the texts he chose to set during his atonal period. Let us begin with Schoenberg's interest in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schoenberg is known to have studied Schopenhauer's philosophy carefully, and it is especially Schopenhauer's aesthetics of music that bear upon the present discussion.(9) As is well known, Schopenhauer divided our knowledge of the world into two aspects, the world as representation and the world as will.(10) Responding to Immanuel Kant's claim that we are restricted in our knowledge of any object by our manner of representing things to ourselves internally (that is, we can never really know what things in the external world are really like, but only how they appear to us), Schopenhauer posited that we can come to understand these "things-in-themselves." The Kantian thing-in-itself is something Schopenhauer calls the "will." The will exists outside of time, space, and causality (these being *a priori* modes of our internal representation). As such, the will is absolutely unified, though it is subject to various degrees of objectification. While the other arts capture these various degrees of objectification of the will through the Platonic Ideas, music captures the will directly, in a manner that has no need of the Ideas. Music thus provides the most accurate representation of the will and, in a certain sense, provides a window onto an "other" world--the will itself. ================================================ 8. This section summarizes much longer and more detailed discussions that have appeared in my "Schoenberg and the Occult: Some Reflections on the 'Musical Idea,'" *Theory and Practice* 17 (1992): 103-18; "The Quest of the Absolute: Schoenberg, Hauer, and the Twelve-Tone Idea," *Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology* 8/1 (1994): 157-77; and "The Sources of Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology,'" paper presented at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society (November 1991), Chicago, Illinois. 9. Schopenhauer's influence on Schoenberg is explored by Pamela White in her article "Schoenberg and Schopenhauer," *Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute* 8/1 (1984): 39-57; and in her book *Schoenberg and the God-Idea* (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1985). 10. The main points of Schopenhauer's philosophy are set down in his main work, *The World as Will and Representation*, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). Music is discussed in detail in the third book of volume one, section 52 (pp. 255-67), and in chapter 39 of the second volume, "On the Metaphysics of Music" (pp. 447-57). ================================================ [14] Schoenberg was also influenced by the description of an "other world"--in this case a spiritual world--as it occurs in the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). The evidence suggests, however, that Schoenberg did not get his knowledge of Swedenborg's ideas from reading Swedenborg directly, but rather Schoenberg seems to have gleaned his knowledge of Swedenborg from the philosophical novels of Honore de Balzac.(11) Consider the following passages from *Seraphita* that describe Swedenborg's heaven: In fact, to the spirit, time and space are not. Distance and duration are proportions proper to matter; and spirit and matter have nothing in common. But the spirit was in the infinite, and they did not know that in the infinite time and space are not, that they were divided from him by gulfs, though apparently so near. In short, everything was at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that, everything existing in everything else, extension knew no limits, and the angels could traverse it everywhere to the utmost depths of the infinite.(12) Schoenberg mentions Balzac's account of Swedenborg's vision of heaven, as it occurs in Balzac's *Seraphita*, in his famous 1941 essay, "Composition With Twelve Tones."(13) Schoenberg likens his notion of the unitary perception of musical time and space to Swedenborg's heaven, where time and space in the physical sense are radically transformed. Thus music, in the most fundamental sense, can be thought to exist in a realm where time and space are unified, and the parallels that Schoenberg draws to Swedenborg's ideas suggest that this realm is not only an "other" one, but a spiritual one as well. ================================================ 11. Schoenberg had a single volume of Swedenborg in his personal library (preserved at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles), and many of the pages remained uncut. See Clara Steuermann, "From the Archives: Schoenberg's Library Catalogue," *Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute* 3/2 (1979): 203-18. For a discussion of the influence of Balzac, Swedenborg, and Steiner on Schoenberg's unfinished oratorio, *Die Jakobsleiter*, see Karl Woerner, "Schoenberg's Oratorium *Die Jakobsleiter*: Musik zwischen Theologie und Weltanschauung," *Schweizerische Musikzeitung* 105 (1965): 250-57 and 333-40. 12. Honore de Balzac, *Seraphita*, trans. Clara Bell, ed. David Blow (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), 143, 148, and 151. 13. Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve-Tones," in *Style and Idea*, 220. ================================================ [15] Schoenberg was probably also familiar with the mystical interpretations of Goethean science forwarded in the 1880s and 90s by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Though Steiner began his career as a scholar editing Goethe's works for two editions, including the prestigious Weimar edition, after the turn of the century his thinking took a distinct turn toward the occult. In 1902 he became head of the German-speaking branch of the Theosophical Society, and in 1913 he formed his own organization, the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner always maintained that his later occult philosophy was founded in German Idealism, and especially in the writings of Goethe. Steiner believed--and argued that Goethe believed--that there exist realms finer than our coarse physical one and that through intuitive perception one can gain access to these finer, and higher spiritual realms. In 1897, Steiner wrote as follows: Goethe's basic conviction was that something can be seen in the plant and in the animal that is not accessible to mere sense observation. What the bodily eye can observe about the organism seems to Goethe to be only the result of the living whole of developmental laws working through one another and accessible to the spiritual eye alone. What he saw in the plant and the animal with his spiritual eye is what he described.(14) Thus, if Schoenberg's understanding of Goethean science was influenced by Steiner or his followers--and Steiner had plenty of followers in Vienna at the turn of the century--then his use of Goethe's science as a model for certain of his theoretical ideas suggests that for Schoenberg music offered a means of spiritual contemplation.(15) ================================================ 14. Rudolph Steiner, *Goethe's World View*, trans. William Lindeman (Spring Valley, New York: Mercury Press, 1985), 77. 15. Severine Neff has stressed the importance of Goethean science in Schoenberg's theoretical writing; see her "Goethe and Schoenberg: Organicism and Analysis," in *Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past*, eds. Christopher Hatch and David Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 409-433. It is worth noting that the writings of Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, and Steiner are ultimately incompatible in a strict philosophical sense; I deal with this problem at some length in "The Sources of Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology'" cited above. ================================================ [16] Schoenberg's interest in other worlds can also be seen in his librettos from the atonal period. The libretto to Schoenberg's unfinished oratorio *Die Jakobsleiter* begins as follows: Whether to right or left, forward or back, uphill or down, one must go on, without asking what lies ahead or behind. It shall be hidden: you were allowed to forget it--you had to--so as to fulfil your task. Certainly *Die Jakobsleiter* is the text from Schoenberg's atonal period most obviously under the influence of mystical ideas. In fact, Karl Woerner has suggested that this libretto has much in common with Steiner's "Mystery Dramas," which were produced in Vienna before the First World War.(16) Indeed, the whole of *Die Jakobsleiter* takes place in an "other" world. ================================================ 16. Woerner, "Schoenbergs Oratorium *Die Jakobsleiter*." ================================================ [17] While not as obviously mystical, many of the other texts used by Schoenberg during his atonal period address what might today be thought of as "alternate modes of consciousness." As Adorno has suggested, for example, *Erwartung* opens up a moment in time; an event that might occur in a minute's time takes up roughly a half hour in performance.(17) *Die Glueckliche Hand* also opens and closes with the same scene (the man with the winged creature on his back), suggesting that the action unfolds in something other than chronological time. These texts have often been interpreted in psychological--and specifically Freudian--terms (*Erwartung* especially). But it is important to recognize that in occult and mystical philosophies, "other" worlds are not always heavens; one can also catch glimpses, or even sustained visions, of hell. The difference lies in the fact that what is for psychologists a hell that exists only in the mind of the patient subjectively, is for mystics like Swedenborg or Steiner something that is really there in an objective sense. ================================================ 17. Theodor W. Adorno, *Philosophy of New Music*, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum, 1973), 30. ================================================ ATONALITY AS AN "OTHER" WORLD [18] Having briefly considered the notion of musical worlding as well as Schoenberg's fascination with other worlds, we can now explore how Schoenberg's turn to atonality may have been motivated by an aesthetic drive to project an "other" musical world. Let us first review the familiar accounts of Schoenberg's turn to atonal composition that have been offered. The composer himself tends to seek continuities between his earlier tonal practice and his subsequent atonal one; he emphasizes that atonality was a natural next step in the development of chromatic music: Most critics of this new style failed to investigate how far the ancient "eternal" laws of aesthetics were observed, spurned, or merely adjusted to changed circumstances. Such superficiality brought about accusations of anarchy and revolution, whereas, on the contrary, this music was distinctly a product of evolution, and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music.(18) ================================================ 18. Schoenberg, "My Evolution," 86. ================================================ [19] Theodor Adorno, while not denying the disruptive effect that atonality produced, nevertheless focusses on the broader aspects of the historical inevitability of the emancipation of the dissonance: What at the time seemed a radical break may be seen today as ratification of the inevitable. Schoenberg overturned the vocabulary, from individual sounds to the schemas of the large forms, but he continued to speak the idiom and to strive for the kind of musical texture which is inseparably tied to the means he eliminated, not merely through common genesis but through its very meaning . . . Even in his most advanced works he remained traditional.(19) For Adorno, Schoenberg's turn to atonality did constitute an important shift, but the passage of time allows us to see that this change was inevitable, and thereby not as radical as it may have seemed at the time. ================================================ 19. Theodor W. Adorno, "Arnold Schoenberg," in *Prisms*, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 160. ================================================ [20] Allen Forte, by contrast, construes atonality and tonality as distinctly different musical contexts. While his account of Schoenberg's transition from tonal to atonal composition emphasizes the fact that certain collections of pitch classes that arise in the tonal works later re-appear in the atonal works, these collections are recontextualized in a crucial way.(20) In the fully atonal works, Forte holds that tonality is no longer operative, and the distinction between tonality and atonality is sharply drawn.(21) Forte begins the Preface to his important study, *The Structure of Atonal Music*, for instance, with the following remarks: In 1908 a profound change in music was initiated when Arnold Schoenberg began composing his "George Lieder" Op. 15. In this work he deliberately relinquished the traditional system of tonality, which had been the basis of musical syntax for the previous two hundred and fifty years. Subsequently, Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, and a number of other composers created the large repertory known as atonal music.(22) ================================================ 20. Allen Forte, "Schoenberg's Creative Evolution: The Path To Atonality," *Musical Quarterly* 64/2 (1978): 133-76. 21. Allen Forte, "Sets and Nonsets in Schoenberg's Atonal Music," *Perspectives of New Music* 11/1 (1972): 43-64. 22. Allen Forte, *The Structure of Atonal Music* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), ix. ================================================ [21] Carl Dahlhaus, in a certain sense siding with Forte and breaking with Adorno's argument in an important way, privileges the disruption that Schoenberg's turn to atonality caused: Yet the fact remains--and to have to admit this is rather difficult for a historian--that it is, strictly speaking, impossible to give a reason for Schoenberg's decision of 1907. Those who speak of historical necessity, of the dictates of the historical moment which Schoenberg obeyed, make the event appear more harmless than it actually was. The suspension of the existing order, the proclamation of the musical state of emergency, was an act of violence. And thus the theories with which Schoenberg attempted to justify the emancipation of the dissonance are characterized by a helplessness which prevents us from taking them at their word as being motives for compositional decisions.(23) For Dahlhaus, Schoenberg's turn to atonality is indeed a turn to a distinctly different musical context; but it also constitutes a decision on Schoenberg's part that cannot be accounted for in terms of such a Hegelian notion as the progress of history. ================================================ 23. Carl Dahlhaus, "Schoenberg's 'Aesthetic Theology,'" 88. ================================================ [22] Considering the various accounts of Schoenberg's turn to atonality, there are a number of ways that one might apply the notion of musical worlding to the analysis of the atonal works. By privileging the notion of historical continuity, for instance, atonality may be seen to extend and continue the tonal tradition. According to this approach, atonality is not really "atonal," but rather a more complicated kind of tonality. Thus, the disruptive effect of "atonality" is illusory, and Schoenberg's atonal pieces should be heard as extending the tonal practice. Any particular atonal work is thus situated within the musical world of the German masterworks of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and analyses may employ modified Schenkerian graphs or Roman-numeral analyses. In various and sometimes very contrasting ways, this approach has been taken up by Will Ogdon, Kenneth L. Hicken, William Benjamin, and Graham Phipps.(24) For the present discussion it is not as crucial to explore *how* each analyst casts atonality as an extension of tonal practice, as much as it is to note simply *that* each offers such an argument. ================================================ 24. Will Ogdon, "How Tonality Functions in Schoenberg's Opus 11, Number 1," *Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute* 5/2 (1981): 169-181; and Kenneth L. Hicken, *Aspects of Harmony: Schoenberg's Six Little Tonal Pieces, Op. 19* (Winnepeg: Frye Publishing, 1984). See also Graham H. Phipps, "Harmony as a Determinant of Structure in Webern's Variations for Orchestra," in *Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past*, eds. Hatch and Bernstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 473-504; while this article deals with Webern's twelve-tone music, its author assures me it is also representative of the approach he takes to the atonal repertory. William Benjamin's work in this area remains unpublished, though he demonstrated his analytical approach to the atonal repertory in a recent presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Tallahassee, Florida (1994). ================================================ [23] A second approach, represented primarily by pitch-class set theory, holds that atonality creates a self-contained musical world.(25) According to this view, the disruption caused by atonality is privileged. Atonal pieces cannot be situated within the musical world of the German masterworks; instead these works create a musical world of their own. Thus, one situates any particular work with regard to other atonal pieces; in considering, say, Schoenberg's Op. 11/1, one interprets it not with regard to earlier tonal pieces, but rather with regard to other atonal pieces like it. The reader may object at this point that pitch- class set theory does not make specific claims about how works should be structured, but rather generalizes relationships that exist potentially within the twelve-pc musical environment. While this may be true in part--though it might prove helpful to destructure why we choose to examine the kinds of relationships that we do--meaning arises in atonal analysis when the analyst interprets the results; and it is the mode of interpretation, I am arguing, that will be determined by one's experience with other atonal works. In short, we operate according to the "hermeneutic circle": we generally attempt to interpret new atonal works in terms of our experience with familiar ones, and the relationships we privilege in so doing situate the atonal work within a world made up of other atonal works.(26) ================================================ 25. It is assumed that readers of this journal are familiar with the central texts in pitch-class set theory; for those unfamiliar with this literature, see the Bibliography provided in John Rahn, *Basic Atonal Theory* (New York: Schirmer, 1980). An interesting contrast between the first and second approaches discussed here can be readily seen by comparing Ogdon's analysis of Schoenberg's Op. 11/1 (cited above) with Forte's analysis of the same piece appearing in his "The Magical Kaleidoscope: Schoenberg's First Atonal Masterwork, Op. 11, No. 1," *Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute* 5/2 (1981): 127-168. 26. As with my discussion of Schenkerian theory above, this is an all-too-brief treatment of a topic to which I will return in a future article. ================================================ [24] There is a third way of thinking about atonality, however; atonality can be seen to serve as an "other-worldly" location from which to view the "world" of traditional tonality. The problem with the kinds of tonal approaches cited above is that each attempts to rationalize--and thereby minimize--the music-historical break caused by atonality. The second approach, however, too quickly dispenses with the value of the tonal past in interpreting atonal music; clearly the past is evoked in atonality, though how it is evoked is problematical.(27) This third approach holds that any particular piece of atonal music must be viewed against the musical world of the German masterworks; but, by virtue of the difficulty of situating such a piece within the tonal tradition, the work assumes a location outside the musical world of these masterworks. According to this view, atonal works are not situated with regard to one another (creating an "other" world of atonality), but rather each atonal work is situated outside the tradition in an individual way; each atonal work, in a sense, steps outside the tonal tradition and reflects back on it from a position that views the tradition from the outside. ================================================ 27. This discussion deals only with aspects of pitch structure in the atonal works. Clearly any discussion that would incorporate the dimensions such as rhythm, form, texture, motivic development, and gesture will locate other ways of evoking earlier repertoires. ================================================ [25] A familiar analytical example drawn from Schoenberg's *Sechs kleine Klavierstuecke*, Op. 19 (1911), may help to clarify the approach I am suggesting. The second piece contains a G-B dyad that is repeated throughout this nine-measure work. In mm. 7-9, a progression of major thirds descends against the ostinato dyad, creating a succession that proceeds F-A, E-flat-G, D-flat-F, and C- E. A tonal analysis of this passage might take these thirds as a stepwise descent from G to C interpreted in the key of C, though Hicken, in fact, takes the piece in G.(28) The entire piece might be seen then as prolonging scale-degree 5, with a descent to scale- degree 1 in the final measures. A pitch-class set analysis might account for the various collections that result from combining other pitch classes with the central G-B dyad; the argument of the piece seems to center on the important trichords (0 1 4) and (0 4 8), and culminate with the statement of the (0 1 4 5 8 9) all- combinatorial hexachord as the final sonority of the piece. Interpreted in this manner, the final "stepwise" descent up to the penultimate dyad D-flat-F could be thought of as the whole-tone collection (0 2 4 6 8 t), an extension of the (0 4 8) trichord. The "resolution" of the dyad D-flat-F into the C-E dyad, which creates a (0 1 4 5) tetrachord, could be seen to prefigure the superset (0 1 4 5 8 9)--a collection that can be formed by combining two (0 4 8)s (the same holds, obviously, for the whole-tone hexachord) or two (0 1 4)s. Depending upon the context one constructs, then, the passage in mm. 7-9 can have at least two very different analytical meanings.(29) ================================================ 28. Hicken, *Aspects of Harmony*, 34. 29. This analytical overview of Op. 19/2 makes no claims to originality. For more detailed treatments of the piece, see Allen Forte, "Context and Continuity in an Atonal Work: A Set-Theoretical Approach," *Perspectives of New Music* 1/2 (1963): 72-82; Deborah Stein, "Schoenberg's Op. 19, no. 2: Voice Leading and Overall Structure in an Atonal Work," *In Theory Only* 2/7 (1976): 27-43; and Marion Guck, "Comment: Symmetrical Structures in Op. 19, no. 2," *In Theory Only* 2/10 (1977): 29-34. ================================================ [26] The approach that I am suggesting would take this piece as invoking the key of C, but disrupting our sense of tonality in a way that prevents it from being situated securely in any key. The final measures make a clear reference to the kind of five-line quality discussed above in connection with the Beethoven piano sonata movement, but simultaneously the structure is not a five- line in the same sense. The "stepwise" descent, G-F-E-flat-D-flat- C, could be thought of as a minor-key descent inflected by the flatted-second scale degree; but, perhaps following the unity of space in Swedenborg's heaven, it is also the inversion of an ascent from scale-degree 4 to scale-degree 1. Thus tonality is invoked but is not present in the usual sense, and a tension is opened up between recognizable tonal references and this particular atonal piece. But the crucial interpretive position I am suggesting is this: one attempts to avoid reducing the piece down to a more normative tonal or atonal practice, and one works to keep the tension open and not allow the analytical drive for reconciliation to attenuate the disruptive effect of the work. The piece is interpreted with regard to the musical world of the great German masterworks, but *it cannot be situated within it*. In a certain sense, it reconfigures that musical world from the outside.(30) ================================================ 30. Obviously more analysis than space here will allow would need to be presented in order to fully explore the interpretive position I am suggesting here. It would, nevertheless, be possible to demonstrate that the "logic" according to which the material for the piece is unfolded develops against a background created by common-practice tonality and expectations, and that all this occurs without the piece itself being tonal. ================================================ [27] This third interpretive approach is reinforced by the impression Schoenberg's atonal music made on even his closest students. Reflecting on the effect Schoenberg's atonal music worked on its early listeners, for instance, Erwin Stein writes: At the time the listener was struck, above all, by the new sound. It was as if a new spatial dimension had been opened up. One could make out contours, which hardly seemed any longer to belong to the realm of music.(31) While it is possible that there is no other way for modern listeners to hear Schoenberg's atonal works but in the context of other atonal works, it certainly would not have been possible for such a hearing to have occurred at the beginning of this century. Even the composer himself could not have heard the earlier works in terms of the later ones, and retrieving that aesthetic perspective requires one to understand how disruptive Schoenberg's turn to atonality really was. And this brings us back to what I take to be the key aesthetic question in considering Schoenberg's atonal music: why disrupt tonality so vigorously? ================================================ 31. Quoted in Willi Reich, *Schoenberg, A Critical Biography*, trans Leo Black (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 49. ================================================ [28] The answer to this question lies in Schoenberg's deep interest in the possibility of projecting the spiritual essence of music. Schoenberg's turn to atonality constituted an attempt to manifest "otherworldliness" in music; atonality is a technical solution--or better, a series of individual technical solutions--to an aesthetic and philosophical problem with which Schoenberg continued to struggle throughout his career. The value of Schoenberg's turn to atonality is that it breaks sharply with the music that precedes it; but this break is effected as a means of reflecting back on the tonal tradition. Atonality was for Schoenberg a way of "spiritualizing" music. Like viewing the Schopenhauerian will, Goethe's *Urphaenomen* (in Steiner's interpretation), or Swedenborg's heaven, all of which underlie the physical universe, atonality was to provide the listener with a spiritual glimpse of the world that "lies behind" tonality. As Swedenborg's "other" world was one in which time and space were radically transformed, so Schoenberg's atonality radically transformed the "tonal" relations between tones. [29] The interpretation presented here does not constitute an attempt to recover in any complete manner the ways in which Schoenberg's atonal music may have been heard in the teens and twenties of the present century. Following Gadamer, one can never recreate the past "as it really was."(32) Still, it should also be clear that, as listeners in the last decade of the twentieth century, we do tend to hear any particular Schoenberg atonal work in the context of other atonal works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and even Bartok and Stravinsky; that is, we situate individual works within the musical world of atonality. I am not arguing against such analyses; indeed, we are perhaps bound to hear these pieces in terms of our own historical situatedness--a situatedness that differs very much from the one early hearers of atonal music would have experienced. In addition (and to the extent one chooses to privilege the composer's hearing of his or her own music) it seems clear that as composers began working increasingly with atonality, they themselves would have tended to situate their own music more and more in the context of other atonal works. Thus it may be that Schoenberg turned to atonality in order to disrupt tonal practice, but discovered in composing his atonal works a new musical environment that had structural possibilities of its own. ================================================ 32. Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method* [1960], 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1991). ================================================ [30] But as mentioned above, such a manner of situating an individual atonal work would not have been possible for those early listeners, no matter what position one takes with regard to Schoenberg's own "pitch-class set consciousness." For those listeners, these works constituted a severe disruption, and it is this original sense of disruption that my interpretation hopes to recover. Schoenberg's turn to atonality opened up a crucial tension between the world of the great masterwork and the individual sounding atonal work. It is in this tension caused by disrupting tonality that an "other worldly" perspective in music was effected. And it was opening up this musical "other" world that was the principal aesthetic goal of Schoenberg's turn to atonality. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ AUTHOR: van den Toorn, Pieter C. TITLE: A Response to Richard Taruskin's "A Myth of the Twentieth Century" KEYWORDS: Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Taruskin, new musicology Pieter C. van den Toorn University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Music Santa Barbara, California 93106-6070 [1] The following is a response to a recent paper of Richard Taruskin's entitled "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Myth Itself'." Taruskin's paper addressed the aesthetic, historical, and analytic-theoretical legacy of Stravinsky's early ballet. It was read at a special festival of Stravinsky's music held at the University of California at Santa Barbara, May 7-9, 1995; also featured at the festival were papers by Robert Craft, Stephen Walsh, Glenn Watkins, and myself. [2] Subsequently, Taruskin's paper was published in *Modernism/Modernity* 2, no. 1 (1995), 1-26. The response followed in a succeeding issue, *Modernism/Modernity* 2, no. 2 (1995). [3] Since many of the issues raised by this exchange involved theory and analysis and, more specifically, aesthetic assumptions likely to be made when analyzing or theorizing about a piece such as *The Rite*, some form of publication in *Music Theory Online* seemed ideal as a way of stimulating discussion and possibly further response. Taruskin's main point was that, in passing off as "extramusical" many of the ballet-related ideas that accompanied *The Rite's* conception, scholars have "sanitized" the work, brushing aside its explosive character, concentrating instead on matters of unity, integration, and method. Several recent textbooks on twentieth-century music were cited as examples of this. In contrast, Taruskin would point to the scenario and Nijinsky's choreography of the music, conceptions which, according to the recent work of several dance historians, can be related to socio-political matters early and later in the century. [4] Musical biography by way of Richard Taruskin can consist of conspiracy tales in which the public, led by an easily compromised academic community, is duped big-time by figures such as Stravinsky and Robert Craft.(1) In the majority of these cases, the story is given a new twist, one that is fresh, insightful, and brilliantly argued. At other times, however, Taruskin's judgements are too sweeping, too dismissive of concerns no less relevant than his own in coming to terms with musical meaning and interpretation. Both forces are at work in his recent "A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and 'The Music Itself'" (*Modernism/Modernity* 2, no.1 (1995), pp.1-26). ================================================= 1. See, for example, Richard Taruskin, "Revising Revision," *Journal of the American Musicological Society* 46 (1993), pp.114-138, in which the dissemination of twelve-tone music in the United States is treated as a kind of academic plot perpetuated by specialists such as Milton Babbitt on an unwilling public. With Stravinsky, the conspiratorial aspect of facts and circumstances that may have gotten hidden or concealed is often treated too seriously, it seems to me. (Perhaps that seriousness is a reflection of Taruskin's faith in the ability of words to contend with music in general--a faith far greater than my own.) In the process, Taruskin can expect too much of his characters, exaggerate the significance of many of Stravinsky's remarks in conversations and at interviews; see his "Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology," 19th-Century Music 16, no.3 (1993), pp.268-302, in which Stravinsky's early neoclassicism is treated as little more than the creation of a few conservative French critics; or witness the Stravinsky-Schoenberg battles of the 1920s and 30s, a debate Taruskin elevates to the status of a critical "public discourse," but one in which the two contestants knew almost nothing of the music about which they expressed such hostility. No doubt, during his neoclassical period, Stravinsky forgot or deliberately misled the public about much of the original conception of *The Rite of Spring* (1913). But this does not privilege that conception, in my opinion. The conviction of Stravinsky's later conception of *The Rite* as a concert piece, one in which the music was left to imply images of a pagan or Spring ritual less explicit than those which presumably accompanied the original version, was felt no less keenly by the composer, and it is for us no less viable aesthetically. See the discussion of this in my *Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). ================================================= [5] Taruskin begins by taking aim at phrases such as "the music itself" and "music in its own terms," the unmediated experience or autonomy such phrases would seem to imply. He suggests that their use by specialists such as Stravinsky, Joseph Kerman, and myself has had the purpose of sidelining non-specialist talk about personal, cultural, and socio-political matters, relegating such matters to the "extramusical."(2) Such phrases have served as "instruments of rejection," in his view. ================================================= 2. I would not have grouped Kerman's views so squarely with those of Stravinsky and other imagined formalists, however, notwithstanding Kerman's references to "the music itself." Always stressing music criticism and the need to confront expressive content, Kerman's stand on theory and analysis is close to Taruskin's. See Joseph Kerman, *Contemplating Music* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp.80-84. More immediately relevant, however, is Kofi Agawu, "Does Music Theory Need Musicology?" *Current Musicology* 53 (1993), p.90. In a positive light, Agawu connects ideas about "the music itself" with the practices of theory and analysis; negatively, of course, that connection underlies Taruskin's complaint. "Although the community of theorists is in some ways fragmented," Agawu writes, "the overriding focus of 'the music itself'... ensures a communality of vision that historians have yet to achieve." Agawu suggests that "critics who shun 'hard' theory... often end up either trafficking in an older theory or simply reinventing the wheel." ================================================= [6] Next, he takes aim at the discipline of music theory and analysis, another culprit in these sins of omission and "rejection." He accuses that discipline of ignoring the tradition within which a piece such as Stravinsky's *The Rite of Spring* (1913) was conceived, of ignoring, indeed, the explosive character of such a piece, the features which in this instance precipitated a riot at the time of the premiere. Instead of investigating such a biography, theorists have concerned themselves with elements of a wholly artificial unity and integration.(3) I shall want to take up these points. ================================================= 3. In this, especially, Taruskin's criticism of theory and analysis is not unlike Kerman's in Kerman, *Contemplating Music.* Kerman's complaint is that, in their quest for unity by way of the application of general methods, theorists have ignored the "salient features" of individual works. But neither Taruskin nor Kerman acknowledge the degree to which analyses of such "features" must rely on standards of commonality and relatedness, in short, theoretical premises. And the sophistication of those analyses depends to some degree on the sophistication of their underlying premises. See the discussion of this in my forthcoming book *Music, Politics, and the Academy*, to be published this Fall, 1995, by the University of California Press. ================================================= [7] "The music itself" need not imply that which is susceptible to measurement alone, of course, music's pitches, intervals, and rhythms. It can allude to all that is proper to it, the uniqueness that is attributed to a piece of music, for example, what is felt and sensed as unrepeatable. My own use of the phrase stems accordingly, and involves the individual context and its felt individuality. (According to Taruskin, both Stravinsky and Kerman imply "some kind of primary, inarticulate, implicitly incommunicable activity." For Stravinsky that activity involved composing, evidently, for Kerman, "performing and listening.") [8] And I suspect that for many listeners an individual work and their experience of that work can indeed be individual, something for which there is no substitute and which is beyond their capacity to comprehend fully. In this respect, of course, musical works are not unlike individual human personalities, while the difficulties encountered in the study of music and its single instances are not unlike those encountered in the study of psychology and its single manifestations. Musicology can sometimes give a different impression of music and its experience, to be sure, especially when, all too relentlessly, music is treated as a "product of culture;" today's "new musicologists" can seem especially rosy in their forecasts, confident in their ability to treat music as a sexual or political enterprise.(4) Yet there is little certainty about the meaning of music, it seems to me, why a specific piece should have the attracting effect it does, why it should be that piece and not another, this observer and not someone else, here rather than there, and so forth. The synthesis that is the whole of this complex web remains a mystery, however much individual pieces may be discussed part by part or in terms of their general features or characteristics (which is also part by part), separated analytically to be made whole again synthetically. (Analysis separates in order to assemble again, a process that permits the acquisition of a familiarity with the detail of a musical whole, and for the purpose of enhancing what may be sensed and felt of that whole, adding to the pleasure that is to be gained from contemplation.) ================================================= 4. See, for example, McClary's feminist analysis of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, first movement, in Susan McClary, *Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp.69-79. Proclamations of the new postmodernist creed are Lawrence Kramer, "The Musicology of the Future," *Repercussions* 1, no.1 (1992), and Gary Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer," *Current Musicology* 53 (1993). ================================================= [9] Partial and incomplete, then, knowing in analysis is knowing in relation to something else. And this is as true of Taruskin's interpretation of the concluding "Sacrificial Dance" of *The Rite of Spring*, in which the ballet's sacrifice of a "Chosen One," ritualistically impersonal, is linked to "biologism, sacrifice of the individual to the community, absence of compassion, and submission to compulsion" (indeed, to a host of 20th-century horrors, including Nazi Germany), as it is of the more "technical" analyses of music theory and analysis which Taruskin is apt to dismiss as sterile and formalist. [10] Indeed, I doubt that even Taruskin would wish to replace the "Sacrificial Dance" with his particular construction of it, "the music itself," then, with images of a pagan or fascist collectivity, images which are necessarily partial and approximate, as I understand them, analytical tools at best. (Only as a form of representation does a musical work become vague and imprecise. As an object of attraction, it is likely to be specific and highly contextual; even very slight changes in its details are likely to bring about a reversal in response.) And there is little reason why "the music itself" should not call to mind not just the materials of music but the uniqueness of those materials as part of single instances, what, sensed and felt, lies beyond analysis and our ability to unravel. Indeed, not to make an assumption of this kind, one involving a transcending reality, is to assume that our descriptions and explanations are capable of standing for the whole, of unlocking music, in effect, rendering its composition, performance, and listening no longer necessary or essential. My instinct is to trust music first and foremost, on the other hand, treating description as a means rather than as an end, a way of invoking its truth, sustaining a sense of its context. And while, to that end, I would not wish to do without socio-political inquiry, my emphasis would be on a more specific "technical" theory and analysis which could penetrate some of the detail of music, allowing that detail, in however indirect a manner, to become a part of what is indeed sensed and felt. Working closely with the materials of music, "technical" analysis can become a way of sustaining the aesthetic presence of a given work. [11] As is well known, of course, Stravinsky was suspicious of descriptions of music, especially when they involved self-expression. And this was not out of squeamishness, I suspect, out of a fear of disclosure or "defeat," but out of a regard for music; its description and explanation could too easily take on a life of its own, become ends rather than means. Instead of serving music as a foil, it could too easily distract, become a substitute for the real thing. In the main, Stravinsky would not have shared Taruskin's confidence in our ability to cope with music outside of music, to deal with its passions in translation; and he would not have placed the same sort of significance in our efforts at translation. Only another piece of music served as a legitimate form of criticism. He would acknowledge that his own work was to some extent "the embodiment of his feeling," that it could be considered "as expressing or symbolizing" that feeling. But he would counter that "consciousness of this step does not concern the composer." Fancying himself as an instinctual composer, a doer rather than a thinker, he continued to stress the boundaries between perception and conception: The composer works through a perceptual, not a conceptual, process. He perceives, he selects, he combines, and is not in the least aware at what point meanings of a different sort and significance grow into his work. All he knows or cares about is his apprehension of the contour of the form, for the form is everything. He can say nothing whatever about meanings.(5) My mind does not count. I am not mirror- struck by my mental functions. My interest passes immediately to the object, the thing made; and it follows that I am more concerned with the concrete than with the other thing, in which, as you see, I am easily muddled.(6) To borrow G.E. Moore's example--"I do not see how you can explain to anyone who does not already know it, what "yellow' is"--I do not see any means of explaining why I have chosen a certain note if whoever hears it does not already know why when he hears it.(7) ================================================= 5. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, *Expositions and Developments* (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p.115. Taruskin's interpretation of Stravinsky's "form" seems pedestrian to me, as if the composer were referring to a detached and lifeless outline of some kind, such as that often associated with the sonata, and not to a dynamic, lived-through sense of timing and place, the musical idea as a rhythm of the whole. 6. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, *Retrospectives and Conclusions* (New York: Knopf, 1969), p.48. 7. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, *Memories and Commentaries* (New York: Doubleday, 1960), p.108. ================================================= [12] Ideas of this kind are dismissed as so much formalistic banter by Taruskin, a form of "rejection," again, the means by which Stravinsky and others (deceivers, all) conceal or brush aside issues central to music. Such ideas are felt to be fundamentally at odds with passion, with the experience of music as passion. But what Stravinsky sought was a state of mind, after all, precisely that to which he refers in the above quotations; immediate contact, the feeling of being at one with music, at one with the world through music. And notwithstanding the sharp distinction Taruskin draws between composing and listening, between Stravinsky's concerns and those of the listener, I doubt that Stravinsky's central purpose is felt any less keenly by average listeners; with a sense of focus and concentration, they too wish to become immersed in music, thinking in rather than about it. [13] Of course, for the listener too, moments of contemplation are but moments. Owing to an inability to hold fast, immediacy gives way to reflection. Yet reflection need not signal a complete break with immediacy. Striving to regain a sense of rapport, the mind may remain suspended in music, seeking assistance not from the outside but from connections that may suggest themselves as part of the continuing context. In this way, reflection follows as a way of sustaining immediacy, and by constructing an image of aesthetic pleasure, what is sensed and felt in immediacy. Theory and analysis follow as a further extension of this process, a way of constructing for the purpose of sustaining and enhancing. [14] Indeed, in so sharply distinguishing the larger concerns of the composer from those of the listener, Taruskin betrays not a little brushing-aside of his own. Depicting Stravinsky's remarks as professional and as involved solely with the "manufacture" of music, he dismisses them not only as formalistic but as "technical" as well, pronouncing them, along with theory and analysis, incapable of addressing the concerns of the listener and of experience in general. In the case of *The Rite*, he recommends the ideas of several dance historians, huge ideas about our "collective unconscious," in fact, but ideas with no chance at all of being pushed into the detail of the music, of answering questions about anything but *The Rite's* most general and obvious features. Thus, starting with the usual premise of a "primeval universe," of primitive man "before the birth of thought and conscience," Lynn Garafola confines herself to the ballet scenario and Nijinsky's choreography.(8) She refers to Nijinsky's use of the body as "an instrument and object of mass oppression" and to the "totalitarian function" of the overall design; she identifies the latter as "masculine" as well, alleging it to have marked Nijinsky's renunciation of homosexuality. The spectacle is then linked to later contemporary events: But as much as the ballet looked back to the dawn of human life, so... it also looked into the future: to a war that unleashed the accumulated evil in men's souls and to a society ruled by the machine. In this sense, Sacre was a harbinger of modernity: of its assembly lines and masses, its war machines and cities of slain innocents. Stripped of their costumes, Nijinsky's masses were both the agents and victims of twentieth-century barbarism.(9) ================================================= 8. Lynn Garafola, *Diaghilev's Ballet Russes* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.70. 9. Garafola, Diaghilev's *Ballet Russes*, p.70. Actually, the views of both Garafola and Taruskin have been anticipated to some extent by Theodor Adorno. See, especially, Theodor W. Adorno, *Philosophy of Modern Music*, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (New York: The Seaburg Press, 1973), p. 145: "Both [*Petrushka* and *The Rite*] have a common nucleus: the anti-humanistic sacrifice to the collective--sacrifice without tragedy, made not in the name of a revewed image of man, but only in the blink affirmation of a situation recognized by the victim." ================================================= [15] But why should talk of "oppression," "war machines," "slain innocents," "accumulated evil," "assembly lines," "barbarism," and "the masses" (all within five lines) bring us closer to the music and its appreciation, a sense of its immediacy, than talk--even "technical" or specialist talk--about its polyphony, motives, harmony, or rhythms? And why should the former be judged sympathetically humanist and interdisciplinary, the latter distant and distancing, as if the materials of music were by nature off-putting, a nitty-gritty bound to inhibit appreciation and to alienate those truly in touch? In my view, both Garafola and Taruskin burden the choreography and the music with expectations which cannot reasonably be fulfilled, expectations which, indeed, in any attempt at fulfillment, distract rather than assist, hinder the listener in arriving at a closer understanding and appreciation. [16] And my sense of much of today's impatience with close, "technical" analysis is that it is neither new nor all that reflective of current trends in sociology and literary criticism.(10) It reflects, rather, the familiar ambitions of musicology, its demands for products that are sufficiently competitive and public, mixed up in turn with a degree of snobbery. Musicologists have always preferred not to deal with music, let alone "the music itself," music's materials and individual contexts and their need for a more "technical" dialogue. In "A Myth of the Twentieth Century," Taruskin is no exception in this. Compared to the grand issues of musicology, which can now boast gender and sexuality as well as politics, "technical" nitty-gritty can seem lowly and ineffectual, to reek all too readily of the rudimentary, in fact, of chalk and erasers. Returning to the ballet scenario and choreography, tying those conceptions to ideas and events later in the century, Taruskin can follow Garafola in tackling the blue chips, pointing to re-discovered isms in the process, BIOLOGISM, for example, the idea of life defined by its physical facts. Here again, however, the problem lies with the indifference of the music to these socio-political shifts, with an impersonal collectivity imagined as fascist rather than (or as well as) pagan; the music neither suggests nor supports these specifics, remaining all the while, and in reaction to them, too abstract and indirect. As with Garafola, too, the relevant terms ("oppression," "Hitler," "nationalism," "submission," "communalism," "Nazi regime") are introduced with no attempt to pursue them into the musical detail. Nor could any such pursuit have been realized, of course, without reducing their mention to silliness, *The Rite* and the implications of, say, "submission," "Hitler," or Nazi Germany to trivialization. (I have argued similarly in cases involving the application of sexuality and gender.) (11) ================================================= 10. Nonetheless, see the objections raised to the "close reading" and analysis of music in Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts," pp.21-22. Tomlinson associates close analysis with various deceptions of modernism, including, as he understands them, notions of autonomy, criticism, "internalism," "Westernism," "transcendentalism," and so forth. See also the treatment of conventional theory and analysis in Susan McClary, "The Politics of Silence and Sound," Afterward to Jacques Attali, *Noise: The Political Economy of Music*, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 150-153. Another recent source of criticism is Edward W. Said, *Musical Elaborations* (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Amidst much ado about what musicology should or should not be (the "new musicologists" are favored, albeit with reservations), Said points to the severity of the "technical requirements imposed by musical analysis," the isolation of those "requirements" (p. xvi). And see Peter Kivy, *Music Alone* (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 126-127, 137, where the practice of Schenkerian analysis is judged cult-like and elitist, too "technically" isolated for the average listener or musician. 11. *Music, Politics, and the Academy* (forthcoming). No doubt, the line between helpfulness and distraction can vary. Many of us start with a musical articulation in *The Rite* that seems "brutal" or "violent" in character, even though the helpfulness or appropriateness of any further elaboration along these lines, the notion that that articulation is "fascist," for example, is another matter. My objection even to some of these general images is that, while capable of being suggested by the music and then of overwhelming it, they can say very little about its materials and their organization, about the choice of a particular chord, for example, about Stravinsky's melodies, rhythmic patterns, or Dorian tetrachords, even though the meaning of the latter detail must reside with that of the whole, and hence presumably with the image that is being proposed. In other words, there can be little specific accounting of one side in terms of the other; greater specificity on one side of the connection (the musical side, for example) leads to the collapse of the other, in fact, not to greater individuality but to what is more crudely stereotypical. ================================================= [17] Indeed, with less a belief in the transcending powers of music, in the ability of music to speak to some degree for itself, musical structures are not more but less free, less able to stand apart from the material or the materially purposeful. Drawn more and more into the uses of the world, into direct forms of ideological and personal-political manipulation, they are less able to function as an alternative to those uses or to awaken a capacity for that alternative. Deprived of a measure of aesthetic autonomy, they lose all significance in and of themselves. Rather, they are valued solely as socio-polictical comment and for the opportunity they afford for such comment. And in the current balancing act between object and subject, musical structure and sensing subject, attention shifts not from music to the musically experiencing subject but from music to the experiencing subject as such, the subject and his or her needs, wants, and concerns. [18] But more specifically, too, it is inaccurate to imply, as indeed Taruskin implies repeatedly, that specialized, detailed, and hence more "technical" accounts of *The Rite* have failed to address the explosive character of the music, its sense of conflict and discord.(12) Theorists such as Elliott Antokoletz and Joseph Straus have dealt at length with the element of conflict in Stravinsky's music, as it is defined by traditional common-practice tonality and by various polarities and symmetries; Straus's more specialized study deals with various irreconcilable tendencies in neoclassical recompositions.(13) ================================================= 12. Taruskin's selection of two general textbooks on 20th-century music to demonstrate the "conventional wisdom" of *The Rite* and its analysis is bizarre; not only are those texts necessarily condensed and often derivative, but the more detailed, specialized literature on Stravinsky and *The Rite* is vast and readily available. Taruskin is not averse to treating specialized papers when it suits his purpose, however; he refers to articles by Robert Moevs and the British theorist Arnold Whittall. The textbooks are by theorists: Robert Morgan *Twentieth-Century Music* (New York: Norton, 1991), and Elliott Antokoletz, *Twentieth-Century Music* (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992). 13. Joseph Straus, *Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). ================================================= [19] My own book on *The Rite* is little else but a discourse on conflict at various levels of structure. Much of the harmonic and melodic vocabulary of *The Rite* is familiar enough, consisting in the main of triads, dominant-seventh chords, and short, diatonic melodic fragments. New, however, are the referential implications of this vocabulary: a simple, folk-like diatonicism is made to stand against chromatic vertical structures which are derived from an eight-note scale commonly referred to as the octatonic scale. (Octatonic relations, which are symmetrical in nature, figure prominently in the music of Debussy, Scriabin, and Bartok as well. In this connection, too, Pierre Boulez has described *The Rite* as a piece in which a horizontal diatonicism stands opposed to a vertical chromaticism.) [20] At the same time, instead of a steady, measure-by-measure sense of harmonic progress, Stravinsky piles chords and melodic fragments on top of each other in layered structures, assigning fixed registers and instruments to the various layers. The fragments of these layers repeat ostinato-like according to varying cycles so that, rhythmically too, there is a sense of conflict and opposition. Typically, the separate layers take on a superimposed rather than blended quality; the reiterated chords and fragments appear as if locked in confrontation, standing at an impasse. And as the individual dance movements draw to a close, there is an accumulation or build-up of such chords and fragments, often in the form of climaxes which, however, lack a clear sense of resolution; the music grinds to a halt as if from exhaustion. The effect can be static yet enormously tense at the same time. [21] The hammer-like ostinato chord mentioned by Taruskin at the beginning of the "Auguries of Spring" is a case in point. The configuration consists of upper and lower components, a dominant-seventh chord on Eb superimposed on a major triad on E. And as the initial pages of Stravinsky's sketches for *The Rite* indicate, those components are treated somewhat separately: each fragment remains confined to a specific register even as it is detached from the initial configuration. The components are not mixed up as, say, motives would be in the development section of a Haydn quartet, tossed from one octave or instrument to another. They remain fixed in superimposition, as it were, without the sense of a developing dialogue. Hence the resistance of so many scholars and analysts, including Taruskin, to more general systems of pitch- and interval-class reduction, systems which would bypass these registral considerations. [22] But this should not suggest, on the other hand, that a sense of integration or harmony is altogether missing from this music. On the contrary, although the two components in question remain separate in their respective registers and pitch contents, they sound together. And their union reflects the other side of *The Rite*, namely, its vertical chromaticism; Eb clashes repeatedly and harshly with a lower E. And it is by such means that a characteristic dissonance, along with the octatonic implications of that dissonance, is made to emerge. [23] A more rigorously applied theory and analysis would pursue these relationships in pitches, intervals, and durations large and small, seeking to construct images of varying kinds and degrees of determinacy. In this way, it would ask how *The Rite* is put together, how its materials are organized, grouped, and segmented, related to other music outside its immediate context. As an extension of the reflection that follows and interacts with immediacy, such an activity seems to me altogether natural for anyone with a yen for a particular musical train of thought. And I would welcome Taruskin's concluding appeal for a compromise between theory and analysis and more general modes of description and explanation, even if many of his terms seem resistant to such a meeting, remaining too specific in themselves to be hooked up with music's detail, applied as a means of explaining the determination of that detail. I can appreciate the need for both aesthetic and socio-political discussion and close, "technical" analysis, but remain skeptical about the forging of relations on terms anything more than fleeting, remote, and tenuous. Indeed, I am leery of the alienating effect of more substantial terms, saddling individual musical structures with stereotypical images inhibiting rather than extending expressive capacity. [24] Still, my argument is less with Taruskin's socio-political constructions (or with those of the "new musicologists," for that matter) than with his treatment of theory and analysis apropos of *The Rite*, the implication that, as analysis, those constructions can take the place of detailed, specialized study. On other occasions, of course, Taruskin has been an imaginative analyst of detail, especially of Stravinsky's music and of Russian music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My worry here is that this current dismissal will add to the growing chorus of dismissals of theory and analysis by "humanists" and "postmodernists" both within and outside the profession.(14) More specifically with respect to the latter, my concern is that, whether intentional or not, the growing dissent (indeed, impatience with "technical" matters) will eventually translate into an indifference towards musical literacy, perhaps even an ideological prejudice thereof, something which can ill be afforded, obviously, but perhaps especially in coincidence with today's succession of budget cuts. Indeed, my sense is that, if the latter cuts in education do not succeed in scuttling "technical" study, then perhaps musicologists aided by today's social critics will. In the final analysis, it cannot be in the interests of music to discourage the close study of its workings, dismiss, almost as a matter of course, that study as unrewarding and forbidding, indeed, as "alien," "formalist," "specialist," "insular," "elitist," "Westernist,""masculinist," and so forth. Too much is made of the difficulty, in any case, and of our inability to cope with a means of communication. ================================================= 14. See notes 2 and 10. A first wave of criticism of "technical" theory and analysis came in the early 1980s from musicologists who, styling themselves as "humanists," argued against the "formalism" and "positivism" of contemporary scholarship; they included Joseph Kerman and Leo Treitler. A second wave has come from "new musicologists," postmodernists, and feminists, many armed with arguments derived from Jacques Derrida. ================================================= [25] It should be borne in mind that analytic-theoretical methods are distinguished not by their "technical" means but by their study at close range, their determination to come to grips with the details of musical structures; the "technical" angle which, necessarily, is descriptive and metaphorical, notwithstanding the label, is symptomatic of that intimacy, of an overriding focus and determination in the direction of detail. Moreover, if the metaphorical content of many "technical" terms is rather neutral and inexplicit, their application will depend to a greater extent on the musical phenomena to which they refer. And the advantage here is that, in seeking to clarify their meanings, it is with the music that the observer is brought into closer contact. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 2. Commentaries AUTHOR: Robison, Brian TITLE: Category structures and fuzzy sets KEYWORDS: Bruckner, Zbikowski, fuzzy sets, fuzzy algorithms REFERENCE: mto.95.1.4.zbikowski.art Brian Robison Department of Music Lincoln Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14850 bcr2@cornell.edu [1] Prior to his examination of the categorical structure of the first main theme in the first movement of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony, Lawrence Zbikowski comments that "The complexity of the phenomenon of typicality may be one reason Zadeh's theory of fuzzy sets(1) has met with only limited success in characterizing the structure of Type 1 categories."(2) The following look at Prof. Zbikowski's analysis highlights (in a non-technical manner) those aspects of it which lend themselves more readily to "fuzzy" rather than "crisp" models, the complexity of their interaction notwithstanding. In particular, I focus on the problems of describing formally those intuitions which enable us to associate different musical phrases in order to group them as members of the same category. ========== 1. Lotfi A. Zadeh, "Fuzzy sets," Information and Control 8 (1965): 338-353. 2. Lawrence Zbikowski, "Theories of categorization and theories of music," Music Theory Online 1.4 (1995): 11. ========== [2] For the benefit of those persons unacquainted with fuzzy sets, algorithms, arithmetic, measures, etc., I'd like to emphasize that I use the word "fuzzy" as a connotationally neutral term which refers simply to matters of "to what degree?" (graded membership) rather than "yes, or no?" (exclusive membership).(3) Whenever I refer below to aspects of "fuzziness" in Zbikowski's analysis, I'm *not* using the word in its colloquial, pejorative sense, to criticize the vague handling of ideas which one ought to render precisely. Rather, I elaborate on various points where, implicitly or explicitly, he touches on the intrinsically imprecise character of certain musical ideas. Thus, I'm not taking issue with his analysis; on the contrary, I merely offer observations geared toward an appropriate formalization of some of the comparatively informal insights which he offers (all of which I believe to be valid). ========== 3. Zadeh, "Fuzzy sets," 339. ========== [3] At first glance, Zbikowski seems to be dealing with a classic fuzzy set: for elements in a universe of "crisply" defined segments of the Bruckner, he tests for membership in the set of *typical* instances of the first theme. The set is fuzzy because it admits degrees of membership: we don't ask simply "*Is* this a typical instance of the first theme (or not)?", but rather, "*To what degree* is this instance of the first theme typical?" Accordingly, Zbikowski ranks these instances: taking mm. 2-6 as typical, mm. 8-12 are "somewhat less typical"(4), mm. 26-28 and 32-34 are "even less typical,"(5) and so on. It's a simple step to formalize these rankings by translating them into membership values between 0 and 1, which reflect not only their relative order but the subjective distances among them as well.(6) ========== 4. Zbikowski, "Theories," 17. 5. Ibid., 18. 6. Zadeh, "Fuzzy sets," 339. ========== [4] However, as Zbikowski points out, the process by which we assign these degrees of membership is anything but linear. Discussing the fragmentary gestures in mm. 35-36, he notes that our judgments of typicality are not simple tallies of the numbers of structural propositions met (and the degree to which a musical segment fulfills them).(7) Instead, some propositions may carry more weight than others, such as his P4, by which texture can signal thematic potential, and these relative weights may well vary according to context.(8) Such factors suggest fuzzy algorithms(9) to model our intuitive calculations of typicality, for example: "If the texture is *highly* complex, then assign *much less* weight to correspondences of rhythm and contour."(10) ========== 7. Zbikowski, "Theories," 18. 8. Ibid., 25. 9. Lotfi A. Zadeh, "Fuzzy algorithms," Information and Control 12 (1968): 94-102. 10. Construction of an explicit fuzzy model would then entail mapping the imprecise quantifiers "highly" and "much less" to ranges of appropriate numerical values. (see Zadeh, "Fuzzy algorithms," 96.) ========== [5] Additionally, examination of the structural propositions reveals varying degrees of specificity. Consider Zbikowski's P3, which describes the contour of the theme's first statement. As Zbikowski compares it to subsequent statements, many of the contours stated as specific (chromatic) intervals seem better served by generic (diatonic) intervals, as in his Figure 1: specific intervals: mm. 2-6: 0 -7 -2 +2 +1 -1 -2 +2 +8 -1 mm. 8-12: +1 -7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 +1 +7 +1 -------------- generic intervals: mm. 2-6: 0 -4 -1 +1 +1 -1 -1 +1 +5 -1 mm. 8-12: +1 -4 +1 -1 -1 +1 +1 "0" +4 +1 -------------- [6] But though these generic intervals clarify the diatonically precise inverse relation of the underlined segments, they fail to convey other essential information: the directed specific interval of -7 between the first two structural tones (Zbikowski's P2), the semitone at the very end, and the presence of a semitone in the turn figure, the absence of which, as Zbikowski mentions, diminishes the typicality of the statements in mm. 159-66.(11) Furthermore, one is left with the task of accounting for the discrepancies between the first, eighth, and ninth intervals of the two series: are we to admit any "off-by-one" surrogate as an acceptably similar variant? If so, are we to admit any number of such surrogates, or is there a point at which the accumulated alterations would disrupt our sense of parallelism? In his pursuit of larger issues, Zbikowski declines to treat these details, yet they are decidedly nontrivial in the creation of an explicit formalization. ========== 11. Zbikowski, "Theories," 22. Zbikowski doesn't comment on whether he feels that the semitones in the statements of mm. 167-74 somehow impart greater typicality to those variants in relation to mm. 159-66 and 175-82. My own intuition is that the presence or absence of a semitone is actually subordinate to the distinction between a strictly stepwise turn (mm. 2-6 and mm. 8-12) and one which embellishes by step-above and third-below (mm. 159-82). ========== [7] So, in addition to (*not* "instead of") Zbikowski's P3, we might propose a slightly more general (and thus more robust) version of the theme's contour: P3'a) the theme contains four structural notes, P3'b) the first (preceded by a sixteenth-note pickup) descends to the second by a perfect fifth, P3'c) a stepwise diatonic turn figure (incorporating a semitone) embellishes the second structural note, proceeding to the third, P3'd) the theme then ascends by leap to the penultimate note, which neighbors the final one (i.e. the fourth structural note) by a semitone. [8] Like Zbikowski's original P3, this new description (P3') of the theme's initial contour doesn't rely on a specification of scale step. However, P3' incorporates both more and less detail: more, in that it invokes a local diatonic frame of reference and (implicitly) considerations of harmony (structural and embellishing tones); less, in that it doesn't specify the interval of the pickup in P3'b, the direction of the turn in P3'c, nor the size of the leap in P3'd. I offer P3' as a version of how one might generalize from Zbikowski's P3 after hearing mm. 8-12: mm. 2-6 are still *more* typical, but P3' subsumes the points by which the second statement deviates from the first. The modified description thus captures somewhat more explicitly the ways in which the statement of mm. 8-12 is more typical than some of the subsequent variants, but without taking on the full complications of a "binary basis for typicality."(12) Furthermore, it does so in a way that distinguishes among the various stepwise motions: some are intrinsic to the theme's schematic contour, while others appear as the results of local harmonic changes. ========== 12. Zbikowski, "Theories," 23. ========== [9] The utility of such vague terms as "leap" becomes apparent when we consider the thematic variants beginning in mm. 159-62. Again, a comparison based on directed specific intervals (Zbikowski's Fig. 2) seems to indicate as many differences as similarities: specific intervals: mm. 2-6: 0 -7 -2 +2 +1 -1 -2 +2 +8 -1 mm. 159-62: +12 +2 -2 -3 +3 +2 -2 -9 +1 Although Zbikowski describes the relation between the contours of mm. 2-6 and mm. 159-62 as an "exact mirror"(13), we see from the specific intervals that the only "exact" aspect of mirroring is with regard to interval *direction*, not size. Again, conversion to diatonic intervals doesn't resolve all discrepancies: generic intervals: mm. 2-6: 0 -4 -1 +1 +1 -1 -1 +1 +5 -1 mm. 159-62: +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 -1 -5 "0" How, then, can we model the intuition of an "exact mirror"? One answer lies on a still greater level of generalization, in a distinction between large (L) and small (s) intervals--or, colloquially, between (L)eap and (s)tep-or-(s)kip:(14) fuzzy-generic intervals: mm. 2-6: 0 -L -s1 +s1 +s2 -s2 -s1 +s1 +L -s mm. 159-62: +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s1 -L +s The designations "s1" and "s2" (ideally with subscripted numerals) provide a simple but flexible means to preserve the turn's diatonic character: that is, although the specific manifestations of s1 and s2 may vary among theme statements, they must adhere to fixed intervals within a single statement.(15) ========== 13. Zbikowski, "Theories," 20. 14. Although not needed within the limits of the present narrow example, a full-fledged fuzzy model would treat explicitly the vague transition between "large steps" and "small leaps." 15. These restrictions thus prevent inappropriately chromatic realizations of < +s -s -s +s +s -s > such as < +3 -2 -2 +1 +2 -1 > --a perfectly good turn for Ligeti or Birtwistle, but obviously not characteristic of Bruckner's material at hand. ========== [10] Not surprisingly, the variants in mm. 163-82 require further adjustment to our description: specific intervals: mm. 159-62: +12 +2 -2 -3 +3 +2 -2 -9 +1 mm. 163-66: 0 +12 +2 -2 -3 +3 +3 -1 -11 -1 mm. 167-70: 0 +12 +1 -1 -4 +4 +1 -1 -7 -1 mm. 171-74: 0 +12 +1 -1 -4 +4 +1 -1 -7 +5 mm. 175-78: 0 +12 +2 -2 -3 +3 +2 -2 -9 +1 mm. 179-82: 0 +12 +2 -2 -3 +3 +2 -1 -9 +1 generic intervals: mm. 159-62: +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 -1 -5 "0" mm. 163-66: 0 +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +2 -1 -6 -1 mm. 167-70: 0 +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 -1 -4 -1 mm. 171-74: 0 +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 -1 -4 +3 mm. 175-78: 0 +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 -1 -5 "0" mm. 179-82: 0 +7 +1 -1 -2 +2 +1 "0" -6 +1 fuzzy-generic intervals: mm. 159-62: +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s1 -L +s mm. 163-66: 0 +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s2 -s -L -s mm. 167-70: 0 +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s1 -L -s mm. 171-74: 0 +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s1 -L +L mm. 175-78: 0 +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s1 -L +s mm. 179-82: 0 +L +s1 -s1 -s2 +s2 +s1 -s -L +s Although relaxing the "s1" restriction on the antepenultimate interval resolves some discrepancies, the anomalous endings of mm. 163-66 and mm. 171-74 suggest the need for a fuzzy corollary: "Correspondences toward the beginnings of statements are more important than those toward their ends."(16) Indeed, applying this fuzzy corollary to the generic-interval descriptions enables us to recover these as sufficiently general descriptions of the statements in mm. 159-82, and thus to invoke the fuzzy-generic level of description only as the means by which we relate these to the theme's initial (and subsequent) manifestations. ========== 16. The corollary is fuzzy in that it does not specify hard- and-fast boundaries for which notes do or do not belong to the "beginning" and "end" of a segment--instead, the saliences of correspondences decrease gradually in sequence. ========== [11] Returning to the verbal descriptions of the theme's contour, we see that just as Zbikowski's P3 provides a basis for generalization to P3' in order to encompass the theme's first two statements, P3' can in turn serve as the basis for an even more general version which bridges the gap between Zbikowski's first and second categories (17): P3"a) the theme contains four structural notes, P3"b) the first (normally preceded by a sixteenth-note pickup) moves to the second by leap, P3"c) a diatonic turn figure embellishes the second structural note, proceeding to the third, P3"d) the theme then moves by leap (opposite the direction of the initial leap) to the penultimate note, which normally neighbors the final one (i.e. the fourth structural note) by a semitone. P3" thus incorporates a high level of generalization of the theme's contour across its various incarnations, to provide a description which one can fine-tune to produce either Zbikowski's P3n (mm. 159-182) or my own P3' (mm. 2-6, 8-12), which one can further refine to arrive at Zbikowski's original P3 (mm. 2-6). The nesting of generalities within generalities suggests that a successful numerical formalization of Zbikowski's analysis would not only require fuzzy algorithms, but that some of the quantities involved might themselves be fuzzy: that is, not a unitary value between 0 and 1, but a weighted *range* of values between 0 and 1. And, as Zbikowski emphasizes, the dynamic process by which we interpret Bruckner's "system of approximate correspondences *and* exact correspondences" (18) dictates that these values (and, indeed, their relative degrees of precision) would vary over time in order to model appropriately our aural cognitions. ========== 17. Zbikowski, "Theories," 21. 18. Ibid., 25. ========== [12] Again, none of the above is to dispute Zbikowski's findings; rather, I wish to focus attention on the many different degrees of precision that come into play in the course of his analysis. In particular, we see that there is no single "proper" or "correct" level of specificity in describing our intuitions about thematic character, especially those by which we associate disparate material. It seems self-evident that, as competent listeners, we perceive music neither as a great blur of shadowy patterns nor as an object of real-time, exhaustively detailed note-for-note (interval-for-interval, duration-for-duration, chord-for-chord...) analysis. Instead, we infer chunks of versatile structure, such that we not only register exact matches but also distinguish among transformations which run the gamut from the slyly (or even cryptically) subtle to the boldly (and even shockingly) dramatic. For these reasons, formalisms based on fuzzy sets and fuzzy algorithms seem ideally suited to model the respects in which, as Zbikowski notes, "categorical processes adequate to music must deal with a large amount of auditory information streaming by in real time...[requiring] a model of categorization that is extremely rapid (at least in its gross aspects) and highly flexible."(19) ========== 19. Zbikowski, "Theories," 26. ========== References ========== Zadeh, Lotfi. "Fuzzy sets." *Information and Control* 8 (1965): 338-353. Zadeh, Lotfi. "Fuzzy algorithms." *Information and Control* 12 (1968): 94-102. Zbikowski, Lawrence. "Theories of categorization and theories of music." *Music Theory Online* 1.4 (1995): 1-26. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ AUTHOR: Zbikowski, Lawrence M. TITLE: Response to Robison, "Category structures and fuzzy sets" KEYWORDS: Robison, categorization, musical categories, empirical research REFERENCE: mto.95.1.4.zbikowski.art Lawrence M. Zbikowski University of Chicago Department of Music Goodspeed Hall 1010 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60615 L-ZBIKOWSKI@UCHICAGO.EDU [1] I am gratified by Brian Robison's response to my essay, not the least because his references are drawn exclusively from the end of the alphabet, a place dear to my heart. I also value Brian's close and sensitive reading of the essay, and his extension of some of its informal formalizations through further formalization and fuzzification. Readers familiar with the SMT list will remember the considerable amount of interest in fuzzy set theory expressed on the list somewhat over a year ago, and may even have at hand the fine bibliography Betsy Marvin assembled and distributed through the list. Because I think of the theoretical methodology I proposed in the essay as a flexible one, I have no argument with Brian's extension. My response is consequently geared toward a brief exploration of some of the implications of Brian's response, as well as a few points of clarification. [2] In my original propositions I offered a fairly loose characterization of categorical structure, intended to model the understanding of a listener moderately familiar with the repertoire but not necessarily well-acquainted with Bruckner's Sixth. As I mentioned in the essay, my assumption is that a listener would arrive at these characterizations without recourse to even the informal formalizations I offered (Zbikowski, 1995: [25])--the propositions instead reflect listeners' "intuitions" about musical organization. [3] Of course, some people's intuitions are considerably more refined than others, and so one would expect the structure of their categorizations of musical events to be rather more detailed, and perhaps embody the specificity of Brian's P3'c ([7] above). Figuring out which is the more accurate characterization would seem to be a matter for empirical verification: recompositions of the relevant passages might be played for listeners, each passage emphasizing different aspects of the hypothesized categorical structure, with the intent of revealing just what musical attributes are most relevant for determinations of similarity. A model for this sort of investigation is Lucy Pollard-Gott's 1983 study. Interestingly enough, initial determinations of thematic similarity by most of her listeners had little to with pitch structure, but were instead based on what are oftentimes thought of as "secondary" parameters: register, dynamics, and the like (Pollard-Gott, 1983: 92-93). [4] The aspect of contour is another area where Brian and I had slightly different approaches. Here I am guilty of a little bit of sloppiness in my prose (what Kerry Snyder, within the context of looking for typos, referred to as a "thinko"). When I claimed there was an "exact mirror" of contour pattern, my thoughts were firmly in Robert Morris's c-space (Morris, 1987). Brian's accommodation of my observation is entirely appropriate, and clarifies what I had expressed unclearly. His discrimination between large and small intervals (and his comment about the problem of large steps and small leaps) fits well with Eugene Narmour's recent work on melodic intervals (see Narmour, 1990; Zbikowski, 1993; and Krumhansl, 1995), which offers a more-or- less explicit formalization of this discrimination. And Brian's fuzzy corollary relating to the importance of the beginnings of thematic statements [10] is borne out by any number of psychological studies of in-time processing. [5] What remains, of course, is a specific implementation of the fuzzy logic approach sketched in Brian's response. The advantage of this approach is that it will introduce a type of formalization about which there is a good deal of interest into the theoretical methodology I proposed, and use this formalization to create somewhat more precise characterizations of categorical structure. I look forward to seeing further work in this area. References ========== Krumhansl, Carol L. 1995. "Music psychology and music theory: Problems and prospects." *Music Theory Spectrum* 17 (Spring):53-80. Morris, Robert D. 1987. *Composition with pitch classes: A theory of compositional design*. New Haven: Yale University Press. Narmour, Eugene. 1990. *The analysis and cognition of basic melodic structures: The implication-realization model.* Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pollard-Gott, Lucy. 1983. "Emergence of thematic concepts in repeated listening to music." *Cognitive Psychology* 15 (January):66-94. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 1993. "Review of Eugene Narmour *The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures*." *Journal of Music Theory* 37 (Spring):177-206. Zbikowski, Lawrence. 1995. "Theories of categorization and theories of music. *Music Theory Online* 1.4. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 3. Reviews AUTHOR: Schubert, Peter N. TITLE: Review of *Musical Poetics* by Joachim Burmeister. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Benito V. Rivera. Edited by Claude V. Palisca (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). KEYWORDS: Theory, Renaissance, Rhetoric, Burmeister, Rivera, Macey, Braun, Haar, Dressler. Peter N. Schubert McGill University Faculty of Music 555 Sherbrooke St. W. Montreal, Quebec H3A 1E3 cypn@musica.mcgill.ca [1] One of the most important items in the history of music theory, Burmeister's 1606 treatise is at last available in English. Benito V. Rivera's edition, translation, and extensive commentary make this volume a model of treatise presentation. Left-hand pages contain Rivera's edition of the text and photoreproductions of the musical examples, diagrams, etc., and the right-hand pages contain the translation and transcriptions. Rivera's discursive introduction briefly sets the context for Burmeister's work, then offers the reader a fairly lengthy survey comparing *Musica Poetica* with Burmeister's two earlier treatises (including a table listing all repertoire examples cited in each of the three treatises, arranged by figure). Rivera also provides comments on chordal sonorities (li) and on mode and cadence (liv), and takes the reader on a tour of his own translating workshop (lix; see also 207), which is especially interesting and sympathetic. Generally, this book is handsomely produced, with an incredibly small number of typos; however, the transcription of part of the chart on p. 60 is missing, and it would be nice if specific discussions in the 48-page introduction were referenced by page numbers instead of "See the Introduction, this vol." [2] Rivera's greatest contribution is the thorough and thoughtful tracking of the sources of terms from rhetoric treatises. These terms are found not only applied to the famous figures, but also in discussions of rhythm, consonance and dissonance, voice-leading, chromaticism, and mode. It seems that wherever one of these buzzwords pops up, Rivera is on it, giving us a citation from a Classical or German rhetorician. He says "The main goal is to recognize the probable literary allusions in Burmeister's teaching, not to identify the precise books from which he drew them" (p. xlvii). In some cases the newly applied terms seem to respond merely to the need for a "classical-sounding term," as Rivera puts it (p. 21), but some reveal a new way of thinking about music. *Disparata*, for instance, is the new category for the sharp (*diezeugmenon*) and flat (*synemmenon*) signs. Rivera's commentary and relevant quotation from Cicero show that Burmeister considers the signs to be like prefixes that change the meanings of words they are applied to, and whose cancellation reduces the notes back to their original simple letter-named identity (p. 27). This represents a step away from hexachordal thinking ("Bfa sung on E") towards the more modern notion of an "accidental" -- as opposed to "essential" -- quality of a note. [3] Two of the "musical ornaments" that receive the most extensive treatment would in any other treatise be classified as contrapuntal procedures: *fuga realis* (an imitative point) and *fuga imaginaria* (canon). Burmeister gives the clearest demonstration I know of the step-by-step composition of an imitative point (p. 161 ff). He places the theme statements diagonally in the four voices, then fills in the blanks (mostly with whole notes, the schematic result of a mechanical procedure). Strict canon at the unison is also presented in a mechanical way, "but the procedure is different from that of *fuga realis*" (p. 189). Here Burmeister suggests composing a melody and immediately adding "harmonic voices," creating a polyphonic texture in as many voices as the canon is to have. (Later he allows that any one of the voices could be the leader, but he specifies that the lowest-sounding voice must come in under the first answering voice.) Laying out the leader diagonally in each of the four voices as he did for *fuga realis*, Burmeister plucks out other melodies from his original harmonic combination to use as the various countersubjects. This didactic method of composing polyphony -- by pulling apart the voices of a harmonic combination and stringing them together sequentially -- is occasionally encountered even in our day. [4] Burmeister's reputation rests on his being the first to use the word "analysis" in our sense, and on his application of rhetorical terms to figures or "musical ornaments." These occupy only a little over a sixth of the treatise, and now we are in a better position to assess the remainder. One novelty is "The Combination of Consonances into a Harmony" (pp. 58 ff), that is, what we call major and minor 5/3 and 6/3 chords built up ("conjugated") from the seven natural notes and Bb. Burmeister notates these using only 12 pitch-class names: C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, Bb, and B, so that many chords are misspelled: a minor 5/3 chord on Bb, for instance, is written Bb-C#-F. (He marks such misspelled chords with an asterisk and says they are "rarely used.") In the transcription, Rivera normalizes the spelling of these chords to reflect triadic function (i.e., Bb-Db-F), with no comment. Burmeister's omission of pitch-class names Ab, A#, Db, and D# is of course a matter of tuning, as Werner Braun notes.(1) Braun also comments on the uniqueness of Burmeister's extension of the tonal system and his experiment with 6/3 chords: "*Doch dieses 'Kuriosum' fand kein Echo*."(2) ================================================================= 1. *Deutsche Musiktheorie des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, zweiter Teil, von Calvisius bis Mattheson. Geschichte der Musiktheorie*, v. 8/II (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), pp. 85-86. 2. Ibid., pp. 156-157. ================================================================= [5] Other interesting contributions include the observation that the imperfect consonance in a chord should not be doubled (p. 92); that the affect of each mode depends on the position of the semitone relative to the final and the fifth, recalling Glarean (pp. 133-134, discussed in the introduction, p. lvi); and the notion of "absolute" and "relative" dissonance (p. 93). Burmeister's method by which young composers should emulate the greats (". . . a similar text should be adorned with the same figure with which the text of that master composer was adorned" p. 159; see also p. 209) is clearly a commonplace of Renaissance composition, and deserves more of our attention as well.(3) ================================================================= 3. See for instance James Haar's essay on Lassus' "*Si bona suscepimus*" in *Music Before 1600*, edited by Mark Everist in *Models of Musical Analysis Series* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 154-174. ================================================================= [6] Some buzzwords are not from the language of rhetoric but from other musical writings. In his discussion of the ornament called *noema* (homorhythmic declamation) we find: "This ornament . . . is made manifest not from these isolated passages (*non ex nudis hisce exemplis*), but from the context of the whole piece. Therefore the whole context must be examined. In other words . . . the whole piece (*integra harmonia*) should be sung by the voices, and then the ornament will reveal itself" (p. 165). From Rivera's translation the reader might conclude that the "isolated passages" are the polyphonic sections delimited by the identifying words, and that preceding and following sections must be consulted. However, one of Burmeister's predecessors uses the term *nudus* to mean a type of exordium in which a single voice begins: "The exordium of a piece is of two kinds: that is, full and naked. . . . We call the exordium naked when the voices do not all enter [together] but follow one after the other." (*Est autem exordium cantilenarum duplex, videlicet plenum et nudum. . . . Nudum appellamus exordium quando non [simul] omnes voces prorumpunt sed aliae post alias ordine procedunt*.")(4) This use of the term suggests that Burmeister is telling his reader that *noema* cannot be apprehended from the individual melodic lines (as found in partbooks), but rather from hearing all the lines together (*integra harmonia* meaning the vertical, not the durational, totality of the piece). ================================================================= 4. Gallus Dressler, *Praecepta musicae Poeticae*, Magdeburg, 1563, ch. 12. Edited by Bernhard Engelke in *Geschichtsblaetter fuer Stadt und Land Magdeburg 49-50* (1914-15) 213-50; reprinted in *Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum*, available on INTERNET from Mathiese@UCS.Indiana.edu. ================================================================= [7] Finally, apart from its intrinsic value as an intellectual "Kuriosum," what use does Burmeister's rhetorical model have for us today? I think many of his "musical ornaments" are not merely new names for well-known compositional features we already had perfectly good names for; several are techniques identified and labeled for the first and only time. *Metalepsis*, for instance, substitutes the second phrase (both music and text) of a point of imitation as the first music sung by some voices. These voices then "turn backward" as Rivera says, to sing the first and second phrases in order (p. xxx). This device, which introduces variety early on, may resemble double fugue, but differs in that there is a "normal order" for the two themes; thus it deserves a different name. (Other unique terms include *pallilogia* and *aposiopesis*.) Burmeister was well aware of the novelty of his terminology, and justified himself with a quote from Quintilian, who was similarly self-conscious: "Many terms are derived from Greek. I see no reason why we should reject these except that we judge ourselves harshly, and therefore we suffer from a poverty of language." Burmeister continues: "I think that . . . our ideas about musical matters can aptly, appropriately, and conveniently be fitted, represented, and matched with such terms and labels" (p. 237). Hear! Hear! More than authentic antiques, they offer precise and unique descriptions of things found in music, and may be applied wherever they seem appropriate, as Patrick Macey has done in his study of a Josquin motet.(5) We will be grateful for this book for a long time to come. ================================================================= 5. Patrick Paul Macey, *Josquin's "Miserere mei Deus": Context, Structure, and Influence*. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985. ================================================================= [8] Laudatory Poem: Be glad, students of music theory, who Ever searched through difficult Latin; No more must you locate In Lassus each rhetorical figure -- To you has PIBEPA given not Only English, but musical examples, Virtually every term's source in Rhetorical treatises, and a detailed Introduction comparing Burmeister's Various earlier attempts to give new names to the Elusive means by which composers move our hearts. Rejoice in this beautiful little book, And with it stand on the shoulders of giants. (Petrus Schubertus Montrealensis) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 4. Announcements A. Mid-Atlantic AMS: Tonal Structures in Early Music (Call for Papers) B. Musicians' Injuries -------------------------- A. Mid-Atlantic AMS: Tonal Structures in Early Music (Call for Papers) CALL FOR PAPERS Tonal Structures in Early Music March 30, 1996 University of Pennsylvania Hosted by the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the AMS A day of papers, round-tables, and informal discussion on theoretical, analytical, historical, and cultural approaches to tonal structure in early music. Coordinated by Cristle Collins Judd at the University of Pennsylvania. Proposals for papers on any aspect of the topic are invited and should include author's name and address, the title of the paper and its approximate duration, and an abstract of 200-250 words. Proposals may also include a more detailed precis of 1000-1500 words and accompanying examples. Proposals must be received no later than October 15, 1995 and should be sent to: Cristle Collins Judd Music Department University of Pennsylvania 201 S. 34th St. Philadelphia PA 19104-6313 tel: (215) 898-7544 fax: (215) 573-2106 e-mail: cjudd@sas.upenn.edu --------------------------------------------------- B. Musicians' Injuries Instrumental musicians are a special risk group for repetitive motion injuries. Sizable percentages of them develop physical problems related to playing their instruments; and if they are also computer users, their risks are compounded and complicated. A World Wide Web page dealing with musician's injuries is being developed at: http://www.engr.unl.edu/ee/eeshop/music.html It's a companion page to the Computer RSI Page at http://www.engr.unl.edu/ee/eeshop/rsi.html which details prevention measures for computer users. Have a look, and consider adding Web links if you manage a page so that students may consider these career-critical health issues. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 5. Employment A. Stanford Univeristy: Musicology, junior faculty B. University of Alberta, Asst. Prof C. National Taiwan University, Musicology and Music Theory (2 positions) ---------------------------------- A. Stanford University: Musicology, junior faculty POSITION/RANK: Musicology: junior faculty, tenure-track INSTITUTION: Stanford Univeristy QUALIFICATION: Ph.D. DUTIES: Teaching courses and supervising individual research at both undergraduate and graduate levels SEND: curriculum vitae DEADLINE: November 17, 1995 CONTACT: Professor Albert Cohen Chairman, Musicology Search Committee Department of Music Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-3076 ---------------------------------- B. University of Alberta, Asst. Prof POSITION/RANK: Assistant Professor of Theory - Tenure Track INSTITUTION: University of Alberta QUALIFICATION: PhD/theory preferred DUTIES: Teach undergraduate and graduate courses, thesis supervision, maintain an active program of research and publication. SEND: Letter of application, CV, 2 examples of publications/papers, 3 confidential letters of reference. DEADLINE: October 16, 1995 CONTACT: Dr Fordyce Pier Department of Music, U of Alberta, Edmonton T6G 2C9 fpier@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca 403 492-3263 403 492-9246 (fax) ------------------------------ C. National Taiwan University, Musicology and Music Theory (2 positions) The Musicology Graduate Program of National Taiwan University seeks candidates to fill two full-time, tenure-track positions, to assume duty on August 1996. POSITION: tenure-track, full-time, beginning August 1996. Position #1: HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGIST Position #2: SYSTEMATIC MUSICOLOGIST or MUSIC THEORIST (Note: Focus of research may be in Western, Chinese, or other musics. The emphasis is on the methodology and perspectives of these two subdisciplines.) INSTITUTION: Graduate program in musicology, National Taiwan University RANK: Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor. SALARY: Starting from US$2,300 per month. QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D degree in hand. Background and research interest in CHINESE MUSIC STUDY are desirable, but all applicants will be considered. DUTIES: teach graduate and undergraduate courses; guide master's thesis; contribute to developing a program that emphasizes a well-rounded training in musicological methodology, a broad-minded perspective on music research, as well as interdisciplinary orientation within a large research university. SEND: An application letter with curriculum vitae, publication list, TWO COPIES of a representative work published within the past three years (including dissertation), and the name, address, phone, fax, and e-mail address of three references. DEADLINE: October 30, 1995. CONTACT: Prof. Shih Shou-chien Graduate Institute of Art History National Taiwan University Taipei, Taiwan Email: nanguanl@ccms.ntu.edu.tw Tel: 886-2-363-0231 ext. 3167 Fax: 886-2-363-9096 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 6. New Dissertations AUTHOR: Barker, Naomi Joy TITLE: Analytical Issues in the Toccatas of Girolamo Frescobaldi INSTITUTION: Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, England BEGUN: October 1991 COMPLETION: July 1995 ABSTRACT: The toccatas in Frescobaldi's two volumes of _Partite e toccate_ (1614/15, 1627) and in his _Fiori musicali_ (1635) represent a genre that is improvisatory in essence but preserved in print; their dual nature is emphasized by the composer's prefaces. Problems concerning the analysis of a musical text that is not fixed owing to the inadequacies of contemporary printing technology, the demands of performance and the imprecise notation of an unwritten tradition are explored before several areas of analytical interest in the toccatas are addressed. Examination of the motivic content of the toccatas reveals structural procedures that apparently belie their improvisatory origins. Their underlying subjects, complex motivic development and large-scale sectional formats may be interpreted as skeletal structures on which improvisational processes are based. Moreover, some underlying procedures are apparently based on modal conventions, and this is supported by the evidence of the ordering and notation of Frescobaldi's three publications. Mode, expressed in terms of motifs formed by the characteristic intervals - especially the species of fifth and fourth - is also shown to be a possible basis for improvisation. The chromatic compositions are discussed in the context of theories of chromaticism and of ancient tonality - their related issues of tuning - and that of contemporary hexachordal and modal theory. Within these toccatas, motif and mode are discussed as manifestations of rhetorical principles: both these aspects are subject to elaboration within strictly defined formal parameters. Formulaic rhetorical procedures provide a framework for the control of musical ideas, which, whether motivic or modal in origin, provide the subject for composition and improvisation. KEYWORDS: modality, Frescobaldi, chromaticism, toccata, improvisation, rhetoric --------------------------- AUTHOR: Leinberger, Charles, F. TITLE: "An Austrian in Hollywood: Leitmotifs and Thematic Transformation in Max Steiner's Film Score 'Now, Voyager'" INSTITUTION: School of Music, Building 4, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 BEGUN: December 1994 COMPLETION: May 1996 ABSTRACT: This document begins with some relevant biographical information on Max Steiner (1988-1971) with emphasis on the events leading up to and including the composing of the Academy-Award-winning score for the 1942 Warner Brothers film "Now, Voyager," as well as a description of the film technology of the time. This is followed by a detailed analysis of thematic material, both melodic and harmonic, and the transformation of those themes throughout the film. Leitmotifs, tonality and functional harmony are an important part of this analysis, as it demonstrates a strong nineteenth-century romantic influence. The relationship between these themes and the narrative of the film is also discussed. Also relevant is the process of film score analysis: the availability of unpublished film scores, and the resources available at various film archives in the United States. KEYWORDS: Steiner, Hollywood, Film, Cinema, Now Voyager, Leitmotif. TOC: I The role of film music in American culture II The life and career of Max Steiner A. Vienna B. New York C. Hollywood III Analysis: Now Voyager, 1942 A. Motivic analysis of melody, harmonic function, rhythm and tonality B. Relationship of motives to the narrative of this film IV Summary of musical influences of nineteenth-century European opera on twentieth-century American cinema. A. Max Steiner B. Other composers CONTACT: NA Voice:(520)751-9024 Cellular: (520)603-2226 Fax:(520)621-8118 --------------------------------------------- AUTHOR: Paget, Laurie TITLE: The Madrigals of Marc'Antonio Ingegneri INSTITUTION: Royal Holloway College, University of London BEGUN: October 1991 COMPLETION: June 1995 ABSTRACT: The importance of Marc'Antonio Ingegneri in the history of the Italian madrigal has hitherto lain in the fact that he was Claudio Monteverdi's teacher. However, his value to the modern musicologist is as a composer whose madrigal publications span the awkward period of change from the late 1560s to the late 1580s. To date, most scholarship has focussed either on the flowering of the madrigal in the early Cinqucento or on its late developments in the closing decades of the century; the mid-Cinquecento madrigal has remained largely unexplored. This dissertation offers new archival evidence relating to Ingegneri's life and career and a survey of his surviving publications, comprising seven books and eight separate madrigals published in anthologies. It also addresses more general stylistic problems surrounding the mid-Cinquecento madrigal, such as cadential hierarchies and the relationship betwen text and musical structure, using Ingegneri's madrigals as illustrations. The final chapter of the dissertation places the madrigals in a contemporary context, using comparisons between Ingegneri's works and those of his masters and his peers, with a concluding examination of Ingegneri's influence on Monteverdi's early compositional style. KEYWORDS: madrigal, Ingegneri, Monteverdi ------------------------------------------- AUTHOR: Wiering, Frans TITLE: "The Language of the Modes. Studies in the History of Polyphonic Modality" INSTITUTION: University of Amsterdam, Department of Musicology, Spuistraat 134, NL-1012 VB Amsterdam, Netherlands BEGUN: October, 1989 COMPLETION: August, 1995 ABSTRACT: The modes of polyphony are studied from a deliberately historical viewpoint. The documentary evidence for the application of the modes to polyphony is problematical and does not support the prevailing image (deriving from Bernhard Meier's writings) of a stable and uniform system that can be easily applied in music analysis. The two main types of evidence are texts that mention the modes, from poems to theoretical treatises, and cycles of compositions through all modes. Four phases are distinguished in the history of polyphonic modality: from the end of the 13th century to 1476, from 1476 to 1547, from 1547 to 1620, and from 1620 to the end of the 18th century. These are characterised as 'uncertain beginnings', 'general acceptance', 'controversy', and 'gradual disappearance'. The appendices contain an annotated survey of c. 250 texts about the modes, and 407 modal cycles. KEYWORDS: mode, polyphony, modal cycles, history of theory, analysis, Bernhard Meier, Zarlino, Renaissance, Italy. TOC: 1 Modality and Its Terminology 2 Polyphonic Modality in Recent Research 3 The Primary Sources of Polyphonic Modality 4 Tinctoris and the Early History of Polyphonic Modality 5 Modus and Tonus 6 The Rise and Fall of Polyphonic Modality 7 Early Cycles from Central Europe 8 Zarlino and Polyphonic Modality in Italy 9 Conclusion: The Language of the Modes Appendix A Textual Sources Appendix B Musical Sources Appendix C Modal Cycles Appendix D Tables of Modal Cycles CONTACT: Frans Wiering, Utrecht University, Department of Computer and Humanities, Achter de Dom 22-24, NL-3512 JP Utrecht, Netherlands. Phone work: +31-30-2536335. Fax work: +31-30-2539221. Phone home: +31-346-262885. E-mail: frans.wiering@let.ruu.nl. -------------------------------- AUTHOR: Wilde, Howard TITLE: Towards a New Theory of Voice-Leading Structure in Sixteenth-Century Polyphony INSTITUTION: Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, England BEGUN: October 1991 COMPLETION: July 1995 ABSTRACT: This study arises from a broad dissatisfaction with the two prevalent strands of contemporary analytical thought on Renaissance music: on the one hand, the work of the post-Schenkerian school seeks to explicate large-scale structures according to an eighteenth-century model of cadential closure (determined by the _Bassbrechung_); on the other hand, it is impossible to formulate normative archetypes of structure with exclusive reference to contemporaneous concepts of mode, since these are too diverse and mutually contradictory. Instead, a set of hypothetical voice-leading archetypes is proposed; these are derived from the principles of sixteenth-century (two-part) cadence theory, but their normative status is analogous to that of the _Ursatz_ in eighteenth-century tonality. The thesis falls into four sections: 1 A critical appraisal of the chief theoretical issues in the analysis of early music, with special reference to sixteenth-century modal theory and to later (Schenkerian) paradigms of tonal behaviour. 2 The formulation of a preliminary hypothesis derived from sixteenth- century cadence theory. 3 The testing of this hypothesis on some problematic works, principally drawn from the output of Palestrina. 4 A variety of analytical case-studies from Josquin to Gesualdo, in order to demonstrate the wider critical and historical potential of the proposed archetypes. KEYWORDS: tonality, modality, Schenker, Palestrina, Josquin, Gesualdo +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 7. Communications Editor's Message 1. Boethius takes over! 2. UCSB Funds MTO 3. Submissions 4. Co-editorial Board ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1. Boethius takes over! The long-anticipated day has finally arrived. MTO and the other SMT networking services now operate entirely from our Internet host, boethius. The main Web pages are: http://smt.ucsb.edu/boethius.html (master page) http://smt.ucsb.edu/mto/index.html (MTO services) http://smt.ucsb.edu/smt-list/smthome.html (SMT services) Due to some changes in directory structure and in the our Web server's configuration, these URLs differ slightly from those given in the Editor's Message in MTO 1.4 (July, 1995). Our anonymous FTP address is: smt.ucsb.edu See the MTO guide (mto-guide.txt) and SMT guide (smt-guide.txt) for details on the directory structure. An alternate FTP site is located at the University of North Texas: smtftp.acs.unt.edu Our gopher address is: smt.ucsb.edu At your host's prompt type: gopher smt.ucsb.edu The main menu has options for MTO and the SMT Email Conference. An alternate gopher site has been established by Philip Baczewski at the University of North Texas (Denton): smtgopher.acs.unt.edu The individual networking services include: MTO (the subscriber mailing list) mto-list@smt.ucsb.edu (only for announcements and TOC distribution, not for communication among subscribers) mto-talk (MTO's associated discussion forum) mto-talk@smt.ucsb.edu MTO FileServer (for retrieving MTO items by email) mto-serv@smt.ucsb.edu MTO Database (online index of MTO articles, reviews, and commentaries) mto-serv@smt.ucsb.edu SMT Email Conference (SMT's electronic discussion forum) smt-list@smt.ucsb.edu FileServer (for retrieving SMT related material) smt-serv@smt.ucsb.edu Online Bibliographic Database (indexes articles and reviews in theory journals) smt-serv@smt.ucsb.edu Many thanks to Robert Judd, MTO Manager, for detailed work of revising the main Web pages to accomodate the new directory structure; and to Phil Baczewski for providing computer resources to establish the alternate gopher site. A third site, for archiving graphic and sound files, is in planning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to be set up and maintained by John Schaffer. ======================================= 2. UCSB Funds MTO The College of Letters and Science at UC Santa Barbara has generously granted MTO the sum of $3,000 for supporting and developing the journal during the 1995-96 academic year, with a possibility for renewal in 1996-97, pending review. The proposal I submitted for funding was the first of its kind at UCSB, and I am grateful for the University's progressive attitude toward scholarly electronic publishing, and its recognition of our accomplishments so far. The money will be used to pay for proofreading and copyediting, as well as for technical assistance and equipment. ============================================================== 3. Submissions One of UCSB's considerations for continued funding of MTO is the number and quality of its submissions. The Co-editorial Board and I have actively sought essays to supplment unsolicited submissions. We hope that the number of essays submitted for review will rise this year, now that MTO has a home and has established itself as a scholarly publication over the past several years. The possibility of multimedia articles in music is exciting and offers opportunities to define new ways of persenting our research. With your contributions, MTO will remain an important medium for bringing new ideas to a worldwide community of those interested in music theory and, through interactive publishing (MTO commentaries and mto-talk), can be a unique vehicle for shaping those ideas. Prospective authors should read the document authors.txt, available in the MTO archives (pub/mto/docs directory), and are encouraged to look into preparing an HTML version of their work, along with a standard plain text version (ASCII). Robert Judd has prepared a guide to HTML editors, complete with links for retrieving the necessary software (www-tools.txt in the pub/mto/docs directory). Essays should be submitted to the MTO General Editor (mto-editor@smt.ucsb.edu). Those interested in writing a review for MTO should contact the Reviews Editor, Brian Alegant (mto-reviews@smt.ucsb.edu). We look forward to receiving your submissions. 4. Co-editorial Board The Co-editorial Board of MTO is appointed by the SMT President in consultation with the Publications Committee. It currently consists of the following members: Lee A. Rothfarb, General Editor (UC Santa Barbara) Robert Judd, MTO Manager (University of Pennsylvania) Brian Alegant, Reviews Editor (McGill University) Dave Headlam (Eastman School of Music) Justin London (Carleton College) Ann K. McNamee (Swarthmore College) We invite your comments and suggestions. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Copyright Statement [1] *Music Theory Online* (MTO) as a whole is Copyright (c) 1995, all rights reserved, by the Society for Music Theory, which is the owner of the journal. Copyrights for individual items published in MTO are held by their authors. Items appearing in MTO may be saved and stored in electronic or paper form, and may be shared among individuals for purposes of scholarly research or discussion, but may *not* be republished in any form, electronic or print, without prior, written permission from the author(s), and advance notification of the editors of MTO. [2] Any redistributed form of items published in MTO must include the following information in a form appropriate to the medium in which the items are to appear: This item appeared in *Music Theory Online* in [VOLUME #, ISSUE #] on [DAY/MONTH/YEAR]. It was authored by [FULL NAME, EMAIL ADDRESS], with whose written permission it is reprinted here. [3] Libraries may archive issues of MTO in electronic or paper form for public access so long as each issue is stored in its entirety, and no access fee is charged. Exceptions to these requirements must be approved in writing by the editors of MTO, who will act in accordance with the decisions of the Society for Music Theory. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ END OF MTO 0.0 (mto.pak.yy.v.i)