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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