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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.