Transcript KMBB Lecture 2 - King's College London

KMBB Lecture 2
The Theory of Musical Topics
What are topics?
Leonard Ratner, Classic Music (1980),
ch. 2
Topics are ‘subjects of musical discourse’
Topics are conventional (pre-existing) types of
material that composers drew on
Topics are often music about music, drawn from
other types of piece (recitative, aria, prelude,
fantasia, fugue, cadenza, chorale, etc)
Topics often possess character (are ‘affective
zones’) and carry associations
Mozart, Sonata in F, K. 332 (ca 1781)
Let’s play name that topic ... Label the topics,
according to Ratner, on the score provided.
If you get stuck, refer to the table of Ratner’s
topics circulated as a handout.
Basic Issues in labelling topics
More than one topic at once (e.g. bb. 1-4)
What is a topic and what is just a compositional
technique or convention (e.g. bb. 49-52)
Topical labels that don’t seem specific enough
for the material (e.g. bb. 42-44)
Uncertainty of topic (e.g. bb. 56-65)
Subjectivity of identification (e.g. bb. 71-75)
Topics and Form
Thinking of sonata form in standard terms as a
harmonic journey, articulated with themes of
more or less contrasting character, do topics
work with, or against, the exposition of this
sonata?
Hint: consider which topics are used for each of
the main areas: tonic area; transition to
dominant; dominant area; closing (dominant
key) phase of the exposition.
Topics, Associations and Meaning
What is Mozart getting at in this piece? In
changing the topic so frequently in the
exposition, what ideas, scenes, images might
be suggested to our imagination?
Masquerade
Inspiration (‘Begeisterung’)
‘All artists ... Sometimes experience an
extraordinary feeling in their soul ... Ideas
suddenly develop themselves with seemingly
no effort, and the best of them flow forth in
such abundance as if the product of some
higher force. Without doubt, this is what one
calls “inspiration”’. Sulzer, General
Encylopaedia of the Fine Arts (1771-74), trans.
Baker & Christensen 1995: 32.
Compositional Bungling
Inspired or not, the implied composer of K.
332/i/exposition appears not to be able to decide
on a single main theme or subject for musical
discourse. Perhaps this makes the piece a
musical ‘joke’, comparable to Mozart’s Ein
musikalischer Spaß, K. 522 (1787) (literally ‘Some
musical fun’), a divertimento for strings and
horns that appears to satirise compositional (and
performance) incompetence in its (elegantly)
awkward, inept and discordant elements.
Inflamed Sensibility and Imagination
Bordering on Madness
‘He crammed together and jumbled up together thirty songs-Italian, French, tragic, comic--in all sorts of different styles.
Sometimes in a bass voice he went down all the way to hell,
and sometimes he'd feign a falsetto and sing at the top of
his voice, tearing into the high points of some songs,
imitating the walk, deportment, gestures of the different
singing characters, by turns furious, soft, imperious,
sniggering. At one point, he's a young girl crying--portraying
all her mannerisms--at another point he's a priest, he's a
king, he's a tyrant--he threatens, commands, loses his
temper. He's a slave. He obeys. He calms down, he laments,
he complains, he laughs--never straying from the tone,
rhythm, or sense of the words or the character of the song’.
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (1763)*
Extramusical Interpretations arising
from topic analysis*
Possess different degrees of plausibility: what
domain is being mapped onto music – something
relatively close or more remote? Are the musical
elements identified important and audible in the
piece or randomly chosen details? Is the reading
consistent with the composer’s context and
beliefs? Is the kind of meaning being given to
music plausible in historical terms? Let’s invent a
relatively implausible interpretation of topical
play in K. 332 – and then identify why it’s
implausible.
Why Ratner’s Theory Matters
• ‘Ratner’s brilliant insight unveiled a wealth of
semantic content in both vocal and
instrumental music long ignored by formalist
critics. Like the paint that once adorned the
Parthenon, his types and styles restored the
vivid colors to the bleached monuments of
Viennese classicism’. Stephen Rumph, Mozart
and Enlightenment Semiotics (California UP,
2012), 79.
A Context for Ratner’s Theory
Not long before her death in 2010, I chatted with Wye
(‘Wendy’) J. Allanbrook, one of Ratner’s PhD students. She
told me that as a postgraduate student at Stanford
University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the music of
HMB was understood as ‘absolute music’ – meaning ‘pure
music’ that is a ‘moving structure’ and refers to nothing but
itself. She confessed to sitting in the library, reading
Edward Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (1854), and
thinking ‘yes!’ as the author proclaimed that rousing
feelings and suggesting images and ideas is not music’s
essential business, nor true to its essential nature. The
‘beautiful’ in music, Hanslick argued, was purely musical;
music is autonomous, something to contemplate, ideally
without emotional involvement.
Cont.
Hanslick insisted that ‘the content of music is
tonally moving forms’ and that compositions
arise from the ‘spontaneous activity of the
[composer’s] imagination’ in creating ‘musical
ideas’ [quotations from chapter 3 of the
treatise].
Hanslick’s views had become institutionalised in
how music was taught. In this context,
Ratner’s theory of topics was a paradigm shift.
Absolute Music Smuggled Back In
Another Ratner pupil, Kofi Agawu, attempted to
integrate topics into Schenkerian analysis, adding
topical labels to his graphs of harmony and voice
leading (Playing with Signs, Princeton UP, 1991).
Agawu was one of several writers who used the
technical vocabulary of semiotics to lend topic
theory a more seemingly ‘objective’ and
formalised basis. (Thus for Agawu, the musical
elements in my table, above, are ‘signifiers’ while
the topical label – the category – is the
‘signified’). Arguably, though, Agawu smuggled
the pure music view back in to ‘topic theory’.
Hermeneutics
Others have been attracted by the hermeneutic
potential of topics to give pieces political/social
meaning. I used topics in that way in my book
Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish
Music, RMA/Ashgate, 2000, where I ‘read’ the
alla turca topic in Mozart as a window opening
out onto the history of military conflict between
the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, and as baring
connotations of then prevalent ideas of Ottoman
masculinity, violence, and primitivism.
K. 331/i vs iii (coda)
The coda of K. 331, which Mozart titled ‘alla turca’
(not ‘rondo alla turca’) was composed in 1783,
100 years after the second siege of Vienna. The
form is odd – sections tacked on without
apparent concern for balance or intelligibility.
The coda, which hardly ‘knows’ the rest of the
piece, involves ‘harsh’ percussive chords, a
melody at once noisy and hollow, a few basic
root-position chords. It is telling us something!
Compare this with the opposite edge of the
sonata – the variation theme of the first
movement.
Current Research on Topics
The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014), ed.
Danuta Mirka, will argue that a topic is music
about music – that a topic is a type of music that
is detached from its original context and appears
in the manner of a borrowing or citation. As part
of this, a range of contributors are examining
which of Ratner’s topics are ‘really’ topics, rather
than simply aspects of a conventionalised
language. Those most altered are Sturm und
Drang, Sensibility, and Fantasia.
Understanding Through Topics
Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, K. 310 (Paris,
Summer 1778), ii. Listen.
Solomon’s reading: bliss and terror refer to
being with, and loosing, the mother
Topical reading: pastoral