Transcript Introduction to History of Western Music

Introduction to the History of
Western Music
Dan Grimley
[email protected]
Lecture 4. Narratives, Stories, and Music
History
Carl Dahlhaus: Foundations of Music History (1977/1983)
• Is music history the history of musical works?
• Or are musical works merely the product of a musical history?
Music history, being the history of an art form, seems doomed to
failure: on the one side it is flanked by the dictates of ‘aesthetic
autonomy’, on the other by a theory of history that clings to the
concept of ‘continuity’. Music history fails either as history by being
a collection of structural analyses of separate works, or as a
history of art by reverting from musical works to occurrences in
social or intellectual history cobbled together in order to impart
cohesion to an historical narrative. [pp. 19-20]
Leo Treitler, ‘The Historiography of Music:
Issues of Past and Present’
• Engagement with the musical work in its autonomy is the
beginning, not the end, of historical interpretation. The
relationship between the investigating scholar in the present
and the historical object in the past is not fixed, but ever
changing [p. 357-8]
• Historia (Latin); storia (Italian); histoire (French); Geschichte
(German); historie (Danish)
• Every story is historical, and every history is a story. This
reflects the fact that we cannot just know the past; we know
pasts in relation to presents and futures. [p. 362]
History of Gregorian Chant: Alterity and Originality
• The very labels ‘Middle Ages’
and ‘medieval’ carry with
them an idea of distance—
psychological, cultural,
aesthetic, stylistic—which was
embodied in the feelings of
the Renaissance who devised
them to express a
consciousness of their own
fundamental difference from
a cultural epoch that they
regarded as past.
• Roman vs. Gregorian chant:
–
–
–
–
Different
Progenitive
National Style
Empire
Janet M Levy, ‘Covert and Casual Values in
Recent Writing on Music’ (1987)
• Joseph Kerman: musicology has eschewed true
criticism.
• Implicit value judgements:
– Who, after all, would contend that negative value was
implied when a musical event was said to be the ‘germ’,
the ‘kernel idea’, or the ‘seed’ of; that it ‘created
continuity’, ‘foreshadowed’, ‘unified’, prefigured’,
‘sustained’, ‘carefully prepared’, represented a fusion of’,
‘concealed seams’, ‘led imperceptibly to’, or ‘created an
organic whole, or unity’?
• Organicism: nature and biology invasive: inflect other
prevalent covert values, e.g. ‘flowering-from-seed’
metaphor and claims of musical economy
Ruth Solie, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and
Musical Analysis’ (1980)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
[Poetic imagination is] the balance or reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with
the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the
representative.
The difference between an inorganic and organic body lies in this: in
the first ... the whole is nothing more than a collection of the
individual parts or phenomena ... while in the second, the whole is
everything, and the parts are nothing.
• Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art
The affirmation and resolution of the contradiction which obtains
between the idea unity and the material juxtaposition of its members,
constitutes the appointed process of life itself. And Life is simply
process. [p. 166].
Musical Organicists #1
• E T A Hoffman, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’,
Zeitung für die elegante Welt, December 1813:
The internal structure of the movements, their
execution, their instrumentation, the way in which
they follow one another—everything contributes to a
single end; above all, it is the intimate
interrelationship among the themes that engenders
the unity which alone has the power to hold the
listener firmly in a single mood. …a deeper
relationship which does not reveal itself in this way
speaks at other times only from mind to mind, and it
is precisely this relationship that prevails between
sections of the two allegros and the Minuet and
which imperiously proclaims the self-possession of
the master’s genius.
Musical Organicists #2
• Heinrich Schenker, Der freie Satz
– Even the octave, fifth, and third of the harmonic series are a
product of the organic activity of the one as subject, just as
the urges of the human being are organic. [p. 9]
– The fundamental structure shows us how the chord of nature
comes to life through a vital natural power. But the primal
power of this established motion must grow and live its own
full life: that which is born to life strives to fulfil itself with the
power of nature [p. 25]
• Rudolph Réti, Thematic Process in Music
– Music is created from sound as life is created from matter. In
the organic sphere one cell engenders the other in its own
image, yet each of the innumerable cells is different from all
the others... [p. 359]
Musical Organicists #3
• Martin Cooper, Beethoven: the Last
Decade (1970), p. 213
... the imperceptive might fail to
understand that the simplicity [of the
finales of opp. 109 and 111] is not the
trivial simplicity of a child’s game but that
of a spiritual genius who has
apprehended the ultimate peace and joy
that lie behind and beyond life’s struggles
and agonies, a genuinely childlike
simplicity achieved after a lifetime of
battles and suffering.
• Donald Mitchell, ‘Mahler’ New Grove
Dictionary (1980), XI, 517
It is correct to refer to Mahler’s
orchestral practice as economical; on the
other hand, so fine and inventive was his
ear that he usually needed very large
orchestras from which his characteristic
wealth of constituent ensembles might
be drawn.’
Susan McClary: ‘Narrative Agendas in “Absolute Music”:
Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony’
• Eduard Hanslick, On the Beautiful in Music (1854)
To the question: what is to be expressed with this musical material? The
answer is: Musical ideas. A fully realised musical idea, however, is
already something beautiful by itself, is its own purpose, and is in no
way merely means or material for the representation of feelings and
thoughts ... Tonally moving forms are the sole content and object of
music.
• Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (1911, trans. 1978)
For [our forebears] the choice of [musical] scale brought the obligation
to treat the first tone of that scale as the fundamental, and to present it
as Alpha and Omega of all that took place in the work, as the patriarchal
ruler over the domain defined by its might and its will: its coat of arms
was displayed at the most conspicuous points, especially at the
beginning and ending. And thus they had a possibility for closing that in
effect resembled a necessity.
Narrative Agendas in Brahms, Symphony no. 3
• It might be argued that the ‘feminine’ theme is less a threat in
and of itself than it is a projection of the hero’s own
ambivalence. In a sense, the ‘feminine’ Other here is gratuitous,
a mere narrative pretext. For the principal dilemma in the
symphony is finally oedipal: the archetypal struggle of the
rebellious son against the conventional Law of the Father, the
struggle that underlies so many western narratives. [p. 340]
• In this movement the principal tension is not between first and
second theme ... but, rather, between a first theme that is
dissonant with respect to conventions that sustain its narrative
procedures and those conventions themselves. To the extent
that the heroic theme bears marks of Otherness with respect to
‘patriarchal’ tonal custom, it itself stands in danger of being
purged for the sake of tonal propriety. [p. 341]
McClary: Brahmsian Conclusions
• Brahms: Hero?
Brahms’s Third Symphony presents
tonality and sonata in a state of
narrative crisis. It takes on and
attempts to derail those
Enlightenment assumptions [of
individual will and social contract],
thus giving voice to the increasing selfalienation of the late-nineteenthcentury individual (usually assumed to
be male) and his feelings of
importance in a totalising world that
always defeats in advance his
challenges to its absolute authority
[p. 343]
• BUT: real subject not Brahms 3, rather
the idea of absolute music, and its
historiographical narrative:
– The end of history
– Music as race and colonial encounter
– Music and nationalism