Transcript KMBB Lecture 8

KMBB Lecture 8
Wit, Humour and the Comic in a
Lecture About Giving A Lecture (or
Writing an Essay)
Is the humour of Haydn’s Keyboard
Music a Laughing Matter?
Understanding the question
Not asking you to notice that H’s music is humorous but to discuss what
humour means and, perhaps, how it arises. More broadly, is humour
trivial? Is humour the same as laughter?
Gathering materials
What is already known (secondary literature)
Your own musical examples and your commentary on other writers’
examples
Arriving at an Informed Perspective or Appraisal
Highlight any fundamental difficulties attending the topic
Capture the range of existing interpretations and play writers off each
other
Endorse an existing – or range of existing perspective(s) – and/or
supplement them with a different or revised angle
Introductions Introduce The Specific
Thing That Will Be Discussed
The description of Haydn’s
music as (in varying senses)
comic, witty or humorous is
so widespread today, that it
is easy to overlook the
difficulties of explaining
how humour arises in
music, and what the
musically humorous meant,
culturally, to Haydn’s
contemporary audiences.

‘Joseph Haydn, though no
whizz as a performer, was a
prolific and important
composer of keyboard
music. His earliest .... ‘
X
A First Example Gets Your Reader Up
To Speed On What Is Well Established
Haydn, Sonata in C major, Hob. XVI/50 (1794-95?), finale
(Allegro molto). ‘A classic example is met in ...’
Humour is usually explained as defeat of expectation, or
comic manipulation of conventions and norms. How is this
evident?
[Class to complete this slide:
Theme veers to ‘wrong’ key; suspenseful silences/pauses;
ungainly shifts of octave; excessive repetition; lack of
variety; moments of seriousness that are difficult to talk
seriously; a sense of physical comedy – clowning – in the
acciaccatura figure (which is used excessively); overall, a
sense of compositional incompetence and a peculiar
mingling of repetition and banality of material]
Step Back: Evaluate conventional wisdom; come
to terms with key terms of the question.
Overall, is defeat of expectation adequate to explain
Haydn’s humour in this example?
1. Is the humorous ‘one thing’ in this piece?
[Class to answer here:
Character of material: high spirited; ‘low’ rustic
dance; performance ‘jokes’ (wrong notes);
mechanical quality, but faulty; suggestions of
compositional bungling or lack of skill; much
depends on the performance – need to prompt
the listener into understanding peculiar musical
events as comic]
Cont.
2. Take the first 10 bars and appraise/evaluate
the theory of defeat of expectation. What
about ‘oration’ and ‘character’? Doesn’t
humour often involve a joke being made at
someone’s expense?
[Class to answer]
Alternative theorisations of humour
Historical (primary) sources on musical humour
reveal a concern with social hierarchy – the
comic is the default mode for dealing with
characters who are not ‘high’ born.
Varieties Of The Comic From Johann G. Sulzer,
Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (‘General
Theory of the Fine Arts’) (1771-4) and Daniel
Weber, ‘On Comedy and Caricature in Musical
Composition’ (1800). Both sources are cited in
Ratner, Classic Music, 387-90:
Musical humour followed literary genre
and literary genre followed social hierarchy
Tragedy
The serious passions and
actions of noble, historical
and mythological
characters. In music, opera
seria.
Comedy
The foibles of everyday,
contemporary characters of
middling and lower social
standing. In music, opera
buffa/singspiel.
Low comedy: clowning,
bungling, farce, mimicry.
Middle comedy: wit.
High comedy: tinged with the
tragic.
Apply this to the earlier example
Haydn’s Sonata in C major, finale, is an example
of the low comic. The theme is a rustic triple
meter dance, the low Other of the minuet. It
possesses an unrefined repeated-note tune
and stamping chordal texture. It represents
the music of (and the music making of) the
lower social orders within the more refined
context of middle class keyboard music. The
associations of this topic include vertigo and
drunkenness.
Cont.
The movement represents compositional incompetence
through the handling of the main theme. It returns in,
or veers off into, the wrong key – a series of blunders
that are highlighted by suspenseful pauses and
corrections. The implied ‘narrator’ or ‘character’ is in
some sense incompetent. Haydn’s humour seems to
rest on social hierarchy, and involves elements of
mockery – even cruelty.
Other instances of this in 18C instrumental music? Other
works by Haydn in which humour works this way?
Dig Deeper Into 18C Understanding of
Comedy
[Look up ‘Comedy’ or ‘Laughter’ in Wikipedia,
Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, JSTOR
and capture a sense of the history of thinking
about them, outside music. ‘Primers’ are
useful too – e.g. Comedy: A Very Short
Introduction, or Comedy in the series New
Critical Idiom. At the same time, don’t get too
sidetracked – keep a sense of what you want
to explain (Haydn) – and so bring the research
to bare upon 18th century]
E.g.
Comedy, in so far as it involved laughter, was often
deemed immoral, and so unsuitable for artistic
practices in Classical antiquity, the Christian
Middle Ages, and in the more secular philosophy
of man in the 18C, because a) it seemed to
involve loss of self control and b) it seemed to
involve a mocking cruelty – a laughing at
someone’s failings. Influential theorists of this
position were Descartes, On the Passions of the
Soul, and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
Recuperating Humour
A solution was to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’
versions of humour – wit serving as the former. In
place of mockery, wit was said to turn on clever
incongruity and surprise.
The middle comic, Sulzer states, ‘pleases and delights’ ‘by
means of its fine wit’. It represents, and is cultivated
by, ‘people of good breeding’ and ‘the genteel world’.
Weber tells us a bit more about the middle comic. He
gives at least two types of humour in this category:
parody and wit. Parody sets something serious in a
ridiculous light.
Daniel Weber on Wit (cited from Ratner,
Classic Music, 387)
“Just as poetic and descriptive wit depends upon the tasteful
connection of one clever idea to another similar idea, so
does musical wit depend as well upon the unexpected
similarity [or compatibility?] of two musical ideas and their
tasteful and proper connection delivered by means of
surprise”.
[Technical note: don’t hide from problems of translation and
terminology. Weber’s definition is ambiguous: he seems to
speak of two ideas that follow each other even though they
don’t really belong together – thus they are ‘tastefully
connected’ by the composer while still involving ‘surprise’.
Ratner suggests that Weber’s German could be translated
as ‘unexpected compatibility’ rather than the more literal
‘unexpected similarity’.]
Haydn, Sonata in E-flat, Hob. XVI/52
(1794), i (Allegro)
Use this example to pin down the ideas of a
social hierarchy of comedy (low, middle, high)
and the notions of parody and wit. Return,
too, to the idea of defeat of expectation,
showing if this still has explanatory value.
[Class to complete this slide:
Engage critically with select recent
literature on the meaning of Haydn’s
humour
E.g. Scott Burnham, ‘Haydn and humour’ in the
Cambridge Companion to Haydn.
[Class to capture Burnham’s point]
Burnham’s Interpretation
One attempt at summary [not necessarily the best or even
complete] might read:
‘Haydn’s mockery of compositional conventions reveals an
intelligence behind the music and so humour ends up
affirming ‘rationality’ as one of the key values of the period.
However Burnham is aware of less affirmative
interpretations, such as Daniel Chua’s premise of Haydn’s
humour as Romantic irony (a music that catches itself out
and is fundamentally detached from its own means and
ends). ....’
Capture as much as possible from the existing literature, as
concisely as possible, and find a way of ordering that
summary, according to the closeness or distance between
writers. [Class to answer: other meanings for humour]
Abstract for Seminar 4
Title needs to be exactly as given – don’t change it to fit your essay.
The abstract should be about 200-250 words.
I’d recommend the following phases:
introduce the topic
is there a conventional understanding?
complicate that understanding with contrary music example(s) or
references to alternative perspectives in the secondary literature
arise at your conclusion in light of what your examples and appraisals
have shown (earn your conclusions)
[Class to have a go at sketching a few abstracts for the different
coursework questions]
Overview of phases of the
lecture/essay we’ve assembled today
Introduced the topic (without writing general background
material on Haydn) and established the general
understanding of it, with reference to a music example.
Problematise the general understanding by introducing
complications – here, through reference to ideas of comedy
in the 18th c.
With reference to a second music example, offer alternative
explanations and meanings for humour, derived from
period sources.
Engage critically with secondary literature in a ‘discussion
phase’, capturing a full range of perspectives.
Conclude with your own position, derived from the evidence
you have assembled.